I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn't great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

I bought exactly that one for my linux box (because I swapped mains to linux and wanted a big boot :-) ), but that was a while back, it's 280€ now, so $328...

This one if for the raz pi 5.

More importantly, what brand, type and/or specs. It's easy to get cheap disks with crap performance. I have a few around that we quickly dubbed "Super Slow Disks".

https://www.shopmyexchange.com/

For vets. No taxes and shipping is free or a standard $5 charge.