Back in 1990-ish (dear God, that was 20-odd years ago!) a guy in the local Amiga user group had a dual external drive. Everyone I knew had an external drive. When I bought my first Amiga 500, it came with an external drive.
I didn't know any Amiga user who used a stock system. Hell, even the one guy I knew who had his Amiga solely for games had an external hard drive for multi-disk games. Odd argument to have.