The biggest thing is you have changed a random write to a linear write, something HDDs are significantly better at. The torrent is downloading little pieces from all over the place, requiring the HDD to move it’s head all over the place to write them. But when simply copying off the ssd, it keeps the head in roughly one place and just writes lineally, utilizing it’s maximum write speed.

I would say try it out, see if it helps.

Also, if the HDD is having to do other tasks at the same time, that will slow it down as the head can only ever be in one place.

Making it harder for firearm education, use, handling and entertainment videos to be on the most popular video platform is not a positive step. The resources people have to safely handle and use firearms has now diminished.

Ryzen laptops which feature capable integrated GPUs serve light and medium gaming tasks well. For heavy use, there are desktops, which is where the real power is. Portable systems like the Steam Deck are also hitting from the mobile side as well.

Gaming laptops have always been an extremely niche product and have gotten squeezed from all ends in recent years.

Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.

It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.

As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.

Yeah, that’s the issue with the argument of ‘just turn it off’. You can turn it off, then tomorrow there will be another thing to turn off (hope you were paying attention to the news to find out what it was!). The next day an update will come along and turn half of them back on. The following the mental script you made to will stop working because they moved half the settings, etc, etc, etc.

It’s a never ending battle as Microsoft fundamentally does not respect their paying users. Microsoft could add a top-level toggle box to automatically disable bloatware, telemetry, and the privacy nightmare that is OP’s story about how the OS records everything you do, but they don’t have this. They don’t want you turning this stuff off, they don’t respect you.

I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).

We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source

As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.

If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.

Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.

For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.

M.2 Enclosure

M.2 Drive to go in it

Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.

Really happy to see replaceable batteries! It’s a wear item and guaranteed to brick your device after a number of years if they aren’t replaceable.