First time upgrading a hard drive

The hard drive on my HP Envy 15-3033cl is about to die. Getting a lot of read errors and bad performance, ran a diagnostic with HDTune and yeah, it's in bad shape.

The laptop is 4 years old. I've already ordered my next laptop, I'll get it Tuesday, but I'd like to replace the hard drive in this and give it to my daughter to use for Animal Jam, Minecraft, that type of stuff. Other than the hard drive I think it's still in pretty good shape. I'd like to upgrade the HDD to an SSD.

I've never replaced or upgraded a hard drive before, never needed to. The hard drive in this computer is apparently THIS. It's SATA II, 2.5", 9.5mm in height. The one I've been considering is this one. It's 2.5" SATA III (but says it's backwards compatible with SATA II), but only 7mm height instead of 9.5mm, I'm assuming I just need to get a bracket/adapter for it? These feel like really dumb questions but I just want to be 100% sure before I buy haha. I'm generally good with computers, but replacing parts is a blind spot for me. If anybody could give me a pointer or two on this I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

You can get something called a SSD spacer to cover the gap. But to be honest, SSDs have no moving parts, you don't really have to care about it as much.

You can do some "ghetto" solution by putting pieces of paper to fill in the gap.

 

I don't think you'd need a bracket since it's a laptop and you'll be screwing on the side of the SSD so height does not matter.

 

Thanks guys.