You hear more and more talk about solid state drives for your computer. But what are they talking about? Why should you get a solid state drive over a conventional hard disk drive? First off, we should look at how a conventional hard disk drive, or HDD, works. In a HDD, there is usually one or a set of metal disks called platters that rotate very fast on a spindle. These platters have a magnetic coating that stores data like word documents, excel spreadsheets, and even operating system files. An articulating arm scans the surfaces of these platters as they rotate. The faster the platters rotate, the faster information can be read from and written to them. To increase read and write speeds, manufacturers speed up the RPM of the drives. The speed increase makes the drive bearings wear faster and makes the drive potentially more prone to mechanical failure.

Solid State Drives, or SSDs, store information on flash memory chips which retain your data even when there is no power connected to the drive. In this way they function much like your USB flash drive you might use to transfer files from one computer to another, but the chips used in an SSD are much faster and more reliable. Removing the platters and read/write arm from the hard drive means that SSDs don't have any moving parts. This makes them more reliable than their HDD counterparts. Not having any platters also means they don't have to scan the platters for your files when you want to open your word document, in turn making SSDs much faster at finding your data. However, there are a couple of downsides with SSDs. First, SSDs are typically more expensive than their HDD counterpart of the same capacity, but the price for an SSD is starting to become more affordable. Second, they don't come in the same capacity options as a typical HDD. You may find a conventional HDD at ten terabyte (10TB) capacity, where some of the bigger SSDs are only available in the two to four terabyte (2TB-4TB) range.

In short, if you like the sound of blazing fast read and write speeds with the added benefit of less moving parts and better reliability, then an SSD is the right pick for you provided you're willing to spend the cash. If pure storage space and capacity is your concern, you're better off spending your money on a bigger capacity HDD.