If you’ve been computer or laptop shopping recently, you have almost certainly seen a lot of acronyms in device descriptions. Two of those acronyms may have been Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and Solid State Drives (SSDs).

What do HDDs and SSDs do?

HDDs and SSDs are two types of persistent storage. In other words, they’re used to store data permanently on your device. For example, when you save a Word document, the document is being saved to persistent storage. This way, you can turn your computer off and back on again later and still be able to retrieve that document.

All consumer computers and laptops will have some kind of persistent storage on it: generally either SSD or HDD.

What are HDDs?

HDDs use magnetic storage to store data on spinning disks. Data is read and written using a mechanical arm with a read/write head. The speed at which the disks spin affects the performance of the drive. Due to their mechanical nature and moving parts, HDDs are prone to failure if there is physical shock to the laptop.

HDDs are older technology than the alternative, SSDs.

What are SSDs?

SSDs use something called flash memory to store data. These disks don’t have any moving parts, which makes them less prone to failure. Additionally, these drives have other benefits over HDDs: they’re faster, consume less energy, and are smaller.

How to choose between HDDs and SSDs

It used to be that SSDs were significantly more expensive than HDDs; however, the pricing between the two has narrowed greatly. At this point, I wouldn’t recommend a computer with a HDD to anyone except maybe in some very limited circumstances. It’s older technology and are worse than SSDs in almost every way. SSDs are certainly worth the nominal price difference.