Man, do yourself a favor and get an SSD. You can get a 512 GB for as cheap as $30 and a 1 TB for as cheap as $60 on Amazon. The speed difference is night and day. That’s probably the single best upgrade you can do to an old machine.

Your thinking of charcoal, which are chunks of wood converted into almost pure carbon by heating them above their combustion temperature in a low oxygen environment. He was talking about coal that was mined out of the ground. Plants from an ancient swamps that didn’t decompose, but were converted into almost pure carbon from millions of years of heat and pressure from being buried.