SSD only recognised as an HDD on an old Toshiba laptop

[m654321]

I doubt that.  The program probably just refers to all storage as HDD.

Now that you have an SSD in that machine, you want to make sure TRIM is set up properly.  Go to the Help Manual (Menu > Favorites > Help Manual) and click on Install in the left panel.  Then in the right panel, select Enabling TRIM on your SSD.

You're right - the default is HDD.  I ran the inxi  command in the terminal of setups (1) to (3), listed in signature, and each time inxi showed the internal drive(s) of the PCs as an HDD, not SSD.
I did finally update the BIOS yesterday on my sister's Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 (from version 1.6 to 1.8 - the latest dating back to 2009!). However, in the absence of any advice for updating BIOS in LL, I had to resort to a basic fresh install of Windows OS to do this - didn't take long.  Even when the BIOS version 1.8 was installed, it still didn't recognise the SSD in the boot device list, the drive continuing to be listed as an HDD.  I guess that's not surprising since the most recent BIOS update is already 7 years old, which is before the time when SSD-use became widespread.

I'm therefore marking this, as solved as I seem to have confirmed the statement I put in the thread header, i.e. the reason for the Satellite Pro A300's failure to recognise the drive as an SSD is probably down to its age - that said, it works much better with an SSD than an HDD...

Thanks for your interest torreydale - do let me know if you hear of an LL-way to update BIOS in the future...

Cheers
Mike