Thinking about switching from SSD to HDD

[Welly Wu]

I installed Leisure Suit Larry and Team Fortress 2 from Steam for Ubuntu Linux and I'm left with exactly 56.80 gigabytes of available disk space on my Crucial m4 SATA-3 128.00 gigabyte solid state disk right now.

It's not a lot of available disk space.

I plan to purchase the Valve Corporation Source Complete Game Pack and Penumbra PC games. I don't plan to download and install everything, but I wish that I could do that.

Here's the thing. I decided not to transfer my huge media library to my internal disk drive on my System76 PC. It's just redundant. I have an enormous amount of high speed Super Speed USB 3 SATA-3 external hard disk drives totaling in excess of 5 terabytes. That's where I store my massive media library.

I got Spotify Premium, Netflix, and Hulu Plus subscriptions. The software is already installed in Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS 64 bit.

I got Verizon FiOS Quantum 75 MB/s download and 35 MB/s upload Internet access and Private Internet Access VPN.

I'm thinking about doing this after all. I just can't decide to get the Seagate Laptop Thin 1 TB SATA-3 SSHD or a Crucial m500 960 GB SSD. I could afford to get both if I wanted to get both, but I'm still debating whether to get the Crucial m500 960 GB SSD. It's actually quite affordable for me. I would just have to wait until October 1st, 2013 or a few days earlier to get it using my Amazon Store Card.

The good thing is that I can swap it out if I get a new System76 notebook PC in August 2014. I can swap in my existing Crucial m4 128 GB SSD back into my older System76 Lemur Ultra Thin (lemu4) so I'd have two notebook PCs with SSDs. Everything is 64 bit now in terms of PC CPUs.

I know myself well enough to say quite accurately that I'll be purchasing Ubunt PC games on a weekly basis. I've got the money for all of this. I just need a high capacity terabyte class internal disk. I already have an older Toshiba SATA-2 1 TB 5,400 RPM hard disk drive stored in my Sentry Safe in my bedroom as an emergency backup disk in case of total failure. I also have 4 GB of PC3-10600 1,600 MHz SODIMM RAM in case of failure. I got a second Lithium Ion battery as backup too.

I'll have to think this through more carefully. What I'm dreading is to re-install Ubuntu from scratch all over again in less than one month. It's a pain to do this again. I never can seem to get an identical installation no matter how well I documented everything in my LibreOffice Writer documents.

[Welly Wu]

I keep reading reviews that the sequential data transfer rate for SSHDs is slightly worse than conventional 5,400 RPM HDDs. It's also much slower than 7,200 RPM HDDs. I do a lot of very large copying of large files in excess of tens of gigabytes so this is a major concern for me. I'll have to keep reading reviews to figure out if I should get a SSHD or not.