Today, especially in laptops, you can choose to mount a normal hard disk, or a more modern SSD, or solid-state drives.
The traditional hard drive, called by the acronym HDD, is the permanent memory of a computer, one that does not empty when you turn off your computer (as does the RAM).
The hard disks are essentially metal plates with magnetic coating where the data is stored by a print head that makes reading and writing.
An SSD is always a fixed memory such as the HDD, but has a different construction: instead of having a flat magnetic spins, is a flash memory chips such as RAM, but able to keep data in memory even if there is no current, or even when the computer is off.
The chip can be permanently installed on the motherboard of the system (as on some small laptops and ultrabooks), on a PCI / PCIe (in some high-end workstation), or in a box.
These flash memory chips are also different from the flash memory USB drives, faster and more reliable.
SSDs are therefore more expensive USB sticks in the same capacity.
The hard disk drive technology, to do a little 'history, is rather old (in terms of the history of the computer).
You can start from the infamous IBM 350 RAMAC 1956 with dishes from 24 - inches wide and 3.75 MB capacity.
The units of today are 2.5 or 3.5 -inch SATA interfaces and use on most PCs and Macs.
Capabilities have grown from those few megabytes up to multiple terabytes, with an increase of millions of times than 50 years ago.
The SSD is nothing more than the evolution of flash memory and we could say that they have made their appearance in 2007 with the mini netbook Asus EEPC, with a capacity of 2 or 4 GB.
SSD and HDD do the same job to boot, load programs, store personal files.
However, there are many differences , in terms of advantages and disadvantages, the use of a hard disk HDD or a solid state drive SSD that determine the choice of one or the other.
Start with the price.
SSDs are very expensive per GB.
For example, a hard disk of a TB 2.5-inch can cost 50 euros while an SSD equal, one terabyte, could cost 400 Euro.
Hard disks are cheaper because they are an older technology and consolidated and why, as we shall see, has the slowest performance.
If so a 1TB SSD is too expensive, you can buy a 250 GB SSD 100 euro (on Amazon).
Today the availability of SSD is higher than that of traditional HDD are slowly diminishing on the market.
Speed
The SSD costs more than a hard disk because it is much faster.
The hard drive has always been the slowest component of a computer, the bottleneck in data processing.
A PC with SSD is able to start in a few seconds and will continue to be faster than a HDD during normal operation.
A PC or Mac with SSD is able to load programs faster with much better performance.
This improvement of performance is the perfect SSD disk to install the operating system.
Fragmentation
The HDD work better with large files that are stored in contiguous blocks on the plate.
In this way, the head can start and finish reading it in one continuous motion.
But when the hard drives are starting to fill up, the large files can be scattered all over the disk platter, or be fragmented.
In the SSD instead no matter where the data is stored as there is no head.
Fragmentation is a concept that, on SSDs , does not exist.
Lifespan
An SSD has no moving parts, so it's more difficult than it breaks the hdd instead always moves (at speeds of hundreds of km / h) and has a high risk of failure.
The life of an SSD is, however, limited to a certain number of writes (although today TRIM technology has limited this problem) and there are some precautions to maintain the SSD and things to never do on computers with SSD.
In general then the traditional hard drives are preferable, even today, if only need to store a lot of data, not to spend too much money.
The SSD but they work better and are faster, stronger, quieter and resistant.
If it were not for the problems of price and limited capabilities, the SSD would win the comparison hands down.
It important to know that you can replace the hard disk drive with a SSD drive on your computer and on the laptop.
For example, if you have a desktop PC disk, you may buy the SSD, transfer Windows and programs on the SSD and leave all the fixed files, images, photos, music, video files and various, old hard drive, which becomes secondary.
If you have a portable hard disk , you could replace the CD-ROM drive with the SSD (work that can be done by the technician or a computer store).
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