I went with elite's default bindings (which use the ABXY keys as layer selectors) and changes a few little things here and there.
Right trackpad is mouse for freelook and menus, back buttons are for vertical and lateral thrusters.
I also have a button menu on the left trackpad that's filled with useful stuff like FA off, SCBs, chaff and similar that are hard to reach with the layer bindings while you're steering your ship.
One little tip: If you hold down one of the ABXY buttons, you will get an overlay that shows you what controls are on that layer. I used it a lot at the start.
Not OP, but I did this a few months ago with this drive: Micron 2TB 2400 M.2 2230 NVMe https://a.co/d/22cD4sp (Amazon link).
It was a little harder to find at the time, but looks like they're just on Amazon now, and at an even better price than when I bought mine (it's 19% off at the time of this comment). I highly recommend it. It's been working flawlessly for me for months.
Just did that a couple of weeks ago, myself! Bought the cheapest deck when it was on sale just recently. It's kind of ridiculous how much space I have on there: 66 games installed, including chonkers like Baldur's Gate 3 and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and I've still got like 700 gigs free.
I have 0 regrets upgrading to 2tb. I now have a dual boot setup with windows taking 1tb and SteamOS taking the other 1tb, and then a 1tb SD card for the SteamOS side. Makes life sooooooo much easier, no longer having to play musical games for what I want on my deck. Can have a modded FO new Vegas list, modded morrowind list, and another couple dozen games with space to spare (ranging from Cyberpunk to terraria). And on the windows side, plenty of room there to play with my different server emulators, VMs and the like. It’s truly ideal and will give you substantially more freedom.
No - strictly because I gutted windows update via a Windows Lite tutorial. Basically it’s an evergreen Windows OS that I’m using, so I never have to worry about Windows messing the boot. SteamOS will sometimes bork it, but I use Clover as my dual boot solution and it’s fairly easy to recover.
The trouble with a stock Windows OS is the frequent updates, to the point of your question. I do believe there are ways to mitigate it, but does require a bit of prep and being aware of windows And its updates.