A solid state drive or SSD can speed up the performance of a computer significantly, often more than what a faster processor (CPU) can. A hard disk drive or HDD is cheaper and offers more storage (500 GB to 1 TB are common) while
SSD disks are more expensive and generally available in 64 GB to 256 GB
configurations.
HDD: The traditional spinning hard Disc drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile
storage on a computer. That is, it doesn't "go away" like the data on
the system memory when you turn the system off. Hard drives are
essentially metal platters with a magnetic coating. That coating stores
your data, whether that data consists of weather reports from the last
century, a high-definition copy of the Star Wars trilogy, or
your digital music collection. A read/write head on an arm accesses the
data while the platters are spinning in a hard drive enclosure.
SSD: An SSD (Solid State Drive) does much the same job functionally (e.g., saving your data while
the system is off, booting your system, etc.) as an HDD, but instead of
a magnetic coating on top of platters, the data is stored on
interconnected flash memory chips that retain the data even when there's
no power present. The chips can either be permanently installed on the
system's motherboard (like on some small laptops and ultrabooks), on a
PCI/PCIe card (in some high-end workstations), or in a box that's sized,
shaped, and wired to slot in for a laptop or desktop's hard drive
(common on everything else). These flash memory chips differ from the
flash memory in USB thumb drives in the type and speed of the memory.
That's the subject of a totally separate technical treatise, but suffice
it to say that the flash memory in SSDs is faster and more reliable
than the flash memory in USB thumb drives. SSDs are consequently more
expensive than USB thumb drives for the same capacities
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