You dont need SSD to store blockchain, it just better be internal drive, not a usb connected. I have all of them sitting on Sata (AHCI) 4tb one. It syncs in minutes on daily basis. Cpu/memory is also a key. Geth is much more resource/disk hungry if you need ETH there as well.

I would highly recommend to build low cost desktop to store all crypto flavors. Junkyard i5 Dell would do it. 2 drives - OS on SSD (small, like 80-120gig, better 2 of them in raid 1 for piece in mind) and big one for chain. 16 gig ram min.

you can specify -datadir=xxxx command line option to bitcoin-qt to separate these data directories

also I would suggest pulling bitcoin wallet build from github: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases

When installing linux on SSD, encrypt all drives with LUKS/etc

Good luck!