well the way I figured it is that I`m going to be having moments of downtime anyway with security updates and such, so tacking on another 5 mins here and there isn`t really going to make much difference, the other option would have been a raid array, but I didn`t have 2 drives at the time I set up Ubuntu on this laptop.
I think I set my DBcache to 2048, I`v read bits about the maxuploadtarget but I don`t understand any of it well enough yet to go messing with settings that I`m not 100% sure about, I`m already outside my comfort zone quite a bit so I really just need time aclimate to what I have so far before introducing greater complexity, I`v already got too many tabs open in my head LOL
such as; I`d like to run my own mempool gui like mempool.space as well eventually (I just like seeing blocks being constructed), but from what I can tell I either need something like Umbrel and I`m not sure that would run on top of bitcoin.core OR... there is stuff on Github that would likely do it but requires way more linux knowledge than I have currently (which isn`t much!).