I'm considering buying a small SSD to throw in a 2014 AMD laptop, hoping to upgrade it from
"unbearable slow" to "usable for very basic web-browsing". It was a cheap laptop at the time, so I fear the CPU itself might be a bottle neck, not just the 320gb of spinning rust. (4GB ram should be sufficient for basic use though)
It runs very well basic tasks. That i3 CPU is pretty decent mobile chip. Gnome itself is bit resource hungry but I chose it because t has most mature wayland integration.
Probably a lot better than that 2014 amd laptop. I had one. It had an amd A6 1450 apu (tbf it ran at 1 ghz) and that cpu was so slow, even on windows 7. A small ssd will help a decent bit.
That spinning rust drive isn't great in terms of performance. Also is it a Toshiba drive by any chance. I went through 1 of the 320 gb drives and 2 of the Toshiba 440 gb drives of that same era. It was a school laptop but I did try to take care of it. Those drives apparently have a not great failure rate.
I have no clue about the HDD model. I guess I'll find out when I replace it xD the HDD has been reliable, it's just unbearably slow.
I saw the HDD light blinking when opening webpages, I'll give the SSD a go to see if the laptop can become somewhat usable. It'll only be intermittently used anyway, so I'd rather not buy a new one. (To save a bit of money and a lot of E-waste)
Ssds are super cheap nowadays. It's a 2.5 in SATA drive and you can get ssds in that form factor.
TEAMGROUP AX2 512GB 3D NAND TLC 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal Solid State Drive SSD (Read Speed up to 540 MB/s) Compatible with Laptop & PC Desktop T253A3512G0C101 https://a.co/d/0QzmGB0
Edit: I'm dumb. You can just search it with lshw for the model of the hdd you have.