I use USB3 SSD audio drives both in the studio for live shows and they work perfectly, as did external esata and standard USB 2 and 3 external 7200 spin drives in the past. FWIW I have never found an external drive to be the bottleneck or point of limitation on a DAW.

I put a 1 TB SSD inside the box and never looked back.
 
For project storage, a spinning drive is probably fine, but if you use a lot of sample libraries (especially in the orchestral realm), solid state is the only way to go.  Samsung has a pro line that costs a little more than the standard line, but the speed is worth the difference.
 
Obviously, someone who knows PCs needs to make sure you have the space and it fits right.  I have a friend who is good at that.

As far as I'm aware the main difference between the Samsung EVO and Pro line is that the Pro line does significantly better on sustained write speeds. Which is irrelevant for sample streaming. I think they're similar or only very slightly faster than the EVO series on reads.