Just a few years ago, PC buyers had limited options when it came to choosing storage for their laptops or desktops. If you purchased an ultraportable in recent years, it’s highly probable that it came equipped with a solid-state drive (SSD) as the primary boot drive. Larger laptops are increasingly adopting SSD boot drives, while budget machines often still opt for hard disk drives (HDDs). Desktop PCs, on the other hand, feature a mix of SSDs and HDDs for boot drives, and some systems even incorporate both, using the SSD for booting and the HDD for additional storage capacity.

♦ What is a Hard Disk Drive? Traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) store information on spinning plates. Since their inception in the early 1960s, HDDs have significantly evolved, doubling in capacity approximately every 18 months. The technology behind HDDs is well-established and thoroughly tested, relying on spinning disks or platters to read and write data.

♦ What’s a Solid-State Drive? Solid-state drives (SSDs) represent a more recent technology that has rapidly advanced, increasing storage capacity each year. Unlike HDDs, SSDs utilize electronic storage in non-volatile memory, ensuring that data persists even when the computer is powered off. SSDs can be likened to large USB drives, sharing a foundational technology known as NAND, a type of flash memory. At the core of SSDs, floating gate transistors record charges (or lack thereof) to store data. These gates are organized in a grid pattern, further structured into blocks, with variable block sizes. An SSD controller oversees various functions, including data location tracking.