Hey stringtheory63,
the WiFi problem is a known problem, unfortunately the Raspberri Pi designers provided no pin for an external antenna and a metal case is faraday cage. Experienced solderers managed to solder an external antenna port to it. However many people use an external USB WiFi adapter and deactivate the internal one. This works better then.
You could use an USB extension cable, some have a little base to put on a table, you could stick velcro to it and attach it somewhere more accessible.
USB drives not recognized are mostly exFAT formatted for which there is no support installed in the rather old raspbian version. Reformatting to FAT32 or NTFS or ext{2..4} helps.
Welcome to the forum!