While some can install in traditional 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard drive bays, other models can be installed in a PCI Express expansion slot or even be mounted directly on the motherboard, a configuration that's now common in late-model systems. Like thumb drives, though, SSDs are often much smaller than HDDs and therefore offer manufacturers more flexibility in designing a PC. ( See our deep-dive guide to SSD jargon.) SSDs are consequently more expensive than USB thumb drives of the same capacities. These flash chips (often dubbed 'NAND') are of a different type than the kind used in USB thumb drives, and are typically faster and more reliable. A read/write head on an arm (or a set of them) accesses the data while the platters are spinning.Īn SSD performs the same basic function as a hard drive, but data is instead stored on interconnected flash-memory chips that retain the data even when there's no power flowing through them. A hard drive is essentially a metal platter with a magnetic coating that stores your data, whether weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the original Star Wars trilogy, or your digital music collection. That is, information on it doesn't 'go away' when you turn off the system, unlike data stored in RAM. The traditional spinning hard drive is the basic non-volatile storage on a computer. If you have to pick just one, though, how do you choose? Let's get into the differences between SSDs and HDDs, and walk you through the advantages and disadvantages of each to help you decide. In some cases, a desktop comes with both, with the SSD as the boot drive and the HDD as a bigger-capacity storage supplement. The boot drives in prebuilt desktop PCs are mostly SSDs now, too, except in the cheapest models.

Bulkier gaming laptops have moved to SSD boot drives, too, while only a subset of budget machines still favor hard disk drives (HDDs). If you bought an ultraportable laptop anytime in the last few years, you very likely got a solid-state drive (SSD) as the primary boot drive.

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