this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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my rec for under 100$ is don't. it doesn't matter how light your use case is, you're just gonna get crap that will die in one year, if it doesn't make you punch it yourself before that. get a barely used old thinkpad if you find one and put linux on it. in general if a laptop's target demo is businesses it'll be a great find on second hand markets because a company has probably bought them en masse and then dumped them due to debt/downsizing and most of them will be healthy. do not get chrome books if it's garbage for elementary schoolkids it'll be garbage for you.
if you just don't have the budget for a new laptop and if your current laptop can be upgraded, put a SSD in it, it's the best way to revive an old laptop. although with the current prices i'm not sure if you can do that under 100$ either.
I bet if you ask on facebook marketplace, lots of people have an old SSD just laying around.
i would recommend against buying second hand SSDs, it's just a scam waiting to happen. you can easily set the device health to 100% even though it's completely used. in the best case you can't use most of its pages and in the worst case it corrupts your data silently. you are far far more likely to see a scam listing than someone that bought a SSD and forgot or couldn't return it. SSD is a wear part, a good SSD (whether brand new or opened) is an unused one, and those are just not common. you are not paying 50% of the price for 50% of the performance, you're paying 50% of the price for violent failure do not fall into this trap.
Imo the only thing worse then buying a used SSD is buying a used hard drive.
Made that mistake a few years ago. Damn thing slowly corrupts stuff. 0/10 would not recommend.
No one makes fake hard drives that report fake capacities though. At most in that market they might reset the SMART data to hide how long it has been on. There is a huge market for fake name brand SSDs that are just SD cards 1/10th the stated capacity and tons of flippers and other scammer assholes who sell them in convincing looking packaging.
I meant beg for a free one lol, I'm assuming 60GB to 128GB is pretty achievable for sub $10.
where i am it is absolutely not but also i am not living in the best of places. with the current AI crisis for i would wager that for 128GB anything below 30$ is a scam but your mileage may vary. begging works but it's really time inefficient too and the results are not that great. begging for money is probably better than begging for parts.