Hard Disk Drive (HDD) / SSD
WHATS IN YOUR PC
SSD vs. HDD: What's the Difference?
The traditional spinning hard drive (HDD) is the basic nonvolatile storage on a computer. That is, it doesn't go away like the data on a systems 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.
An SSD does much the same job functionally 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