I was thinking about buying a 2.5" 9.5 mm 1 terabyte 7,200 RPM hard drive for my System76 Lemur Ultra Thin notebook PC to replace the Crucial M4 128 GB SATA-III ssd. I can get one from Amazon for $100. Most of my files that I care about are long term archives. I installed a lot of PPAs and apps, but I only use Google Chrome, Mozilla Thunderbird, Calculator, CrashPlan+, Spotify, Shotwell, Adobe Reader 9, Zinio Reader 4, and LastPass Pocket most frequently. The thing that prevents me from doing this is that I would have to re-install everything from scratch and I hate re-installing everything from scratch all over again. It's a royal pain in the butt. Of course, I can afford to purchase a 512 GB SATA-III SSD for the Lemur, but I'd have to re-install everything again too.
The problem with disk imaging software is that it's usually an imperfect result when copying two different drives with different capacities. I tried this with a Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500 GB 7,200 RPM hdd and Ubuntu refused to boot up properly. I got kernel panics. So, I learned my lesson and the best practice is to re-install everything to guarantee compatibility and performance. I think it came down to sector alignment issues when cloning a drive image.
MP3s are very good. Now, I have a lot more money and I'm thinking about getting a Cowon X7 160 GB DAP. I don't have one and I was thinking about getting one used from another member here. It's compatible with Linux kernel 2.4+. It supports file transfers in Linux. The reviews are glowing especially regarding long battery life and sound quality for the X7. I could easily copy my entire MP3 music library to the X7 and I could play my music on the go using my ER-4PT. That would be cool.
This is the primary reason why I switched from FLAC to MP3. Convenience. Not having to worry if a particular audio codec or format is supported is a good thing.
FLAC is very nice for archival purposes. It's good to have a loss less bit-perfect copy for archival purposes. However, the huge file sizes are a bummer and the sound quality compared to 320 Kbps MP3s or AACs is nearly indistinguishable. MP3s make a lot of sense to me. I won't have to buy another huge portable or desktop HDD for many years in the future now that I switched to lossy M4v and MP3 formats.