Laptop unexpected shutdowns

[RB998]

I have an acer nitro 5 AN515-51 laptop. Lately, I've been having issues with my laptop turning off while in sleep mode during transit to and from school. This is infrequent, but often enough to be annoying.
I took the laptop into bestbuy, and the head "geek" suggested that it was an issue caused by transporting the laptop around while in sleep mode. Essentially, they said the HDD wasn't/doesn't power down while in sleep mode, and jostling during transit is causing the HDD to initiate immediate shutdowns to prevent damage.

 

Furthermore, there is a possibly related issue where (2 times now) while sitting on my desk the laptop has unexpectedly shutdown while on battery. If this happens, the laptop will not boot at all under battery power, but will boot when plugged in. If I pull the power cord in this state, it immediately kills the power (regardless of battery charge remaining). Once I do a full shutdown/reboot cycle, the laptop works on battery power again. The first time this happened was a month or so ago, and hadn't recurred until last night after talking to the bestbuy people. The first time this happened, I was actively using the laptop (typing etc) and heard the hdd brake (i.e. stop spinning; not break) at the same time as the shutdown. Last night when this occurred, the pc was plugged in, I was using an external keyboard and mouse, and didn't realise the issue was present until I put the laptop into sleep mode and unplugged it, when it immediately shutdown (and wouldn't run on battery until I manually shutdown and rebooted).

 

I have not had any issues with data usage on the HDD, and I don't know what triggers the unexpected shutdown while it's on my desk to better troubleshoot. I'm also not under warranty and am not enamoured with the idea of backing up and performing a factory reset for bestbuy to poke around. 

 

Has anyone experienced stuff like this before? What are some tests I can perform on my own to try and narrow down the causes? Is it likely that swapping the HDD for a sata SSD would solve either issue (as the bestbuy people said the HDD wasn't properly powering down during sleep mode)?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

 

specs:

windows 10 18362

i5-7300HQ

bios: insyde corp V1.13

HDD: toshiba MQ04ABF100