Just external - I know it’s not the best solution. My setup grew on a tight budget over the last 10 years and for me it was the easiest, most affordable, and extendable/replaceable way. I don’t need super fast drives in my home and I don’t need backups for most of the data stored on a media server. So it kind of is just a bunch of disks with a NUC.
The internal drive for the system is an SSD though. Came with the computer.
It was in fact the mum who was good with computers. Bobby himself was never that interested in exploits.