Does anyone have experience with external hard drives or hard drive swapping on PlayStation 4?

My PS4 has now reached the limit of its storage capacity (approx. 500 GB) and I know that I have three options in Grude how I can continue to install new games in the future.

1: Delete old games to make room for new ones
2: Connect external storage medium
3: Replace the hard drive with a larger one

Since the first option is a bit annoying, I wanted to ask what kind of experiences you have had with the other two.
Does an external storage medium slow down the system performance?
Is replacing a hard drive difficult and risky for beginners?
Instructions on the Internet always sound so easy, but if you have never had to do this before, you are of course unsure that you can do something wrong and damage the console in the end.

So I have been using an external hard drive with 3TB for several years and I'm very satisfied, I also installed a 2TB hard drive and the installation was actually very easy, with the corresponding video instructions, of course.

Couldn't find any real disadvantages from the external hard drive, but I'm not sure if it changes anything in the system performance!

If so, it should be so minimal that I haven't noticed it yet.

Ah okay, all right, thank you very much. Yes, I think I'll get an external hard drive. If you want to install a new hard drive, you need an interim storage facility for the data anyway, if you want to save hours of reinstalling and whether I can find a USB stick of the appropriate size, I don't know either.

Are there any USB sticks with 1 TB or more and can they also be used as external storage?

Are there actually problems when you want to remove and reconnect the external hard drive? I have a USB stick for saving game backups, which of course I want to continue to use, although I could also take my controller off the grid in an emergency if it couldn't be otherwise.

If you want to remove the external hard drive you can select in the quick menu that you want to stop using the hard drive and can then remove it without problems.

If the PlayStation is switched off (not in sleep mode), it can also be easily removed.

I've done it a lot myself.

I don't know if there are 1TB USB sticks xD