If you’ve bought a small and lightweight laptop in recent years, chances are it came with a special kind of storage called an SSD. This helps your laptop start up quickly. Some bigger laptops also use this technology now, and only a few older ones use a different type of storage called a hard drive. This hard drive is slower but still works okay for basic tasks.
Computers also have something like a memory where they keep things they’re currently working on. But when you turn off the computer, the information in this memory goes away. However, the information stored on the SSD or hard drive doesn’t disappear when you turn off the computer. It stays there for the next time you use it.
The hard drive is the great-grandson of the record player. A spinning disk and a little arm that goes back and forth. instead of grooves on a vinal disk itis Ones and Zeros.
Imagine the SSD as a super-fast version of this storage, like a digital version of a photo album, and the hard drive as an older version that takes a bit more time to find things, like a big old bookshelf. This is very similar to a USB stick in how it deals with data in comparison to a hard drive
Nowadays, most computers use this SSD storage, which is faster and more reliable, making things smoother and better. But sometimes, computers have both the super-fast SSD for quick things and the slower hard drive for storing lots of stuff, like photos and videos.
If you have to choose between the two, remember that the super-fast SSD is a bit more expensive than the slower hard drive. So, if you don’t need things to happen super quickly and you have a lot of photos and videos, the slower hard drive might be just fine for you and it can save you some money too.