High Disk and Memory Usage with little to nothing open. Tried factory reset, got an error. New HDD?

[gmrJ]

Hello, so I have an HP Gaming Pavilion - 15-cx0077wm.

Believe me, I know, it is roughly 5-6 years old now. Laptop "lifespans" are hardly that, especially when they were used for gaming for a few years.

However, new laptops are crazy expensive nowadays and I'd like to get through another year of university work, which requires some programs like MATLAB and SOLIDWORKS.

So to get to the point, the issue I have at hand is my Disk runs at 100% or a very high percent... very very often. It has spurts of being low, around 30% to 4% or so. But it somehow ends up back at 100% quite often. Similarly, I have 8GB of memory, and it is running at around 80%+ constantly, 83% as I type this now with only chrome and task manager open. I might also look into another 8GB.

Sometimes starting the laptop up can take quite a long time too.

I tried to reboot everything, a clean start, reinstall windows, and such, however, that did not work... I got thrown an error. I tried using a USB Windows installation, similar situation. The laptop tried to check the C Drive and it's 5 parts. It took about 4 hours, then said it couldn't complete the process or something similar. Unable to even factory reset this, is kind of frustrating. I looked into the issue and found a similar case: At this link

I believe I must have an issue with the old hard drive in this case.

Basically, I am trying to find out if that is really the issue, and if so (with an HP 8478 motherboard), could I replace the HDD, or add an SSD to the motherboard? Perhaps this: SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA III SSD 1TB 2.5” Internal Solid State Drive

Thank you so much, this has been so frustrating. Any and all help is highly appreciated. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

~Josh

Specs:

Model:                HP Gaming Pavilion - 15-cx0077wm

Motherboard:   HP 8478

HDD:                   Screenshot of Drives (Unsure of what D is in this case) 

Processor:        Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8750H CPU @ 2.20GHz, 2208 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)

Edit: After writing initially, the disk has been at 2% for a while, however even with that, it will go back to 100% guaranteed. It has been doing this for upward of a year or two now.