WD/SanDisk have completely gone to shit. I’d go with Seagate. I have a bunch of IronWolf Pro drives that have been fast and reliable.

I agree with the sentiment, but if Mint and Pop needed too much tinkering for OP, a hackintosh out of his Nvidia laptop would be out of the question, I assume.

Not a horrible place to be stuck, though. Pop!_OS is pretty great. I run it on my media server and it’s been rock solid. I definitely wouldn’t mind running it on an old laptop.