If the Amiga situation in Europe was the same as the C64 situation, I'll believe that external floppy drives were rare there. In Europe the datasette remained the main data storage device for the C64 and external floppy drives were a lot more rare there --- in fact in Europe there were all sorts of fast loader devices/software for making datasette loading faster. Here in Canada (and I assume the USA) most people dumped their datasettes when upgrading from the VIC-20 to a nice new C64 with 1541 drive.
