My hard drive is at 100% of usage and slows my pc down

Hi Andp.

If the drive is as old as you say it is then I would almost certainly say your thinking along the right lines.
If you have never had or used a system with a good solid state drive fitted to it as a boot drive for the operating system.
and for installing and running other programs such as wordpress, drupal, magento on xampp localhost.

You will notice the performance of loading times for the os and programs you wish to run, and for saving files or projects to it.
But I have to ask how old the motherboard is of the system you are using.
Because to get the best out of an SSD performance wise.
The board will have to be relatively new with support for Sata 2.0 or 3.0 SSD drives.

If you see alot of disk activity of the old mechanical hard drive it can often mean that the system you are running and the amount of main system memory you have fitted if low is the cause.

So if your system only has a total of 4gb of main system memory.
And you have a lot of programs set to auto launch after windows has loaded into memory, each program set to auto run ect will also use up system memory if the list is long.

In such a case when free system memory or resources become low windows will revert to using virtual storage where it treats a set portion of the hard drive as a temporary storage area for swapping data and storing data if lots of programs are running in windows at the same time and physical system ram or memory is low.

That is often why you see a hard disk drive working at 100%.

The cure is to buy more ram to avoid windows resorting to using the swap file windows sets up on a hard drive.

So if you only have 4gb of ram or system memory and the motherboard you have is quite new, as well as buying a SSD drive you should consider buying more system ram upgrading the memory of the system to 8gb or more if you tend to run multiple programs in windows at the same time.

Then use the old mechanical you have for extra data storage ect.
The old drive must of been 500 Gb.

The most recommended SSD drive is a Samsung evo.
Because it has a good read and write speed, but they are more expensive to buy.

Cheaper SSD drives for the same stated storage capacity will often have a high read speed, but the write speed of the drive can differ or be much lower due to lower quality flash chips used on them for storage capacity.

I just thought I should point this out as something to look for if you want an all round good SSD drive with good read and write speeds.