Just be aware that the USB external drives are pre-coded for "PC" formats only, so you can't use those as a source for a generic floppy recover session. I.e. you can't expect to be able to ready anything from some other non-PC brand of computer.
I mean just the other way: say you have an old mainframe in production and you need to clone a floppy, clone it to a more modern medium then use an adaptor.
I still have thousands of old 5.25 floppies. I've transferred or tossed most of the 3.5, since I was able to get a drive for that.