Takeout does work, but its extremely cumbersome as it gives you everything in a massive archive.
In this case it might be appropriate because it's a mass-transfer of everything, and it might even be faster because it's all one file - but using rclone should be fine, and then you won't have the mess to deal with of trying to unpack a 13TB large archive.... as that can be a logistical nightmare. Where the heck are you supposed to unpack to? 
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Right, I would prefer rclone over other options all day. In fact, if I weren't on Linux, I'd still use rclone exclusively for my Google Drive operations. It's so flexible and useful- and being CLI it isn't bogged down with option limitations or menu clutter. It's clean and scriptable.
If I were in his situation, I'd rclone all of GDrive to that external drive, then Google Takeout everything else. (I didn't used to do that- I'd let my student & business accounts expire and only take certain things from GDrive, but needing files later that I no longer could access has caused a bit of data hoarder behavior since then)
Sorry for the off-topic discussion, but why would being on Linux be a reason to not use rclone? rclone is native to Linux...
It's the other way around. Rclone is (imo) the best utility/tool available for syncing anything to Google Drive. Linux doesn't have a native (official) Google Drive application. There are many alternatives- rclone, googledriveocamlfuse, odrive, insync, overgrive, etc.
OSX and Windows both have (official) Google Drive Sync programs of some kind. So, in the event that I had to use OSX or Windows, I'd still choose rclone over anything else available.
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