Is this a good hard disk?

1tb is cheap because magnetic platter type drives will always be cheaper than flash based solid state disks. when choosing a disk try to go for wd black edition, not blue or green. also when picking up one try to find one with the most cache. cache is a buffer on your hard drive to make your day to day clicking fast

Do you realize that you are comparing a hard drive (the seagate 7200.12) with SSD's (solid state drives)? You are comparing apples and oranges. SSD's are still relatively small in capacity and high in price. You need to compare that seagate with other hard drives, not SSD's.

It depends on what you are looking for. SSD's are still fairly new and while HDD's are about as reliable, SSD's will be faster in data storage access. If your using paging files (from lack of RAM/physical memory) then SSD's would pick up the pace. It might shorten the lifespan of the SSD in which case i would stick with the HDD (in fact i would upgrade the RAM then),

If your looking for more storage space then the 1TB would be the choice. I would partition the hard drive so you have a minimum of 40GB (100GB is plenty) depending on what you store on the drive itself. The rest of the space can be dedicated to your data, i would recommend backing up any important data in case of the drive going bad. If you have a cd/dvd burner that would be an ideal way of storing your data.