The older and most present day computers (PCs, Laptops) come with the spinning hard disc drive (HDD). It has a spinning and has lots of nuts, bolts, motors, disks, etc. The SSD is devoid of these mechanical moving parts. The HDD is non-volatile memory and what you store (write on to) on the spinning disc is available anytime you want unless you erase it. SSD is also non-volatile.
The SSD is somewhat similar to the thumb drive in that data is stored in flash memory. However, the SSD is performance-wise different in the type and speed of memory. Since they are high-end products, they are significantly more reliable as they are expensive for the same memory capacity.
If you are simply storing some images and documents a lower storage value would do, but if you are storing videos and multi-media may be you should go for 1 TB or more.
Spinning disc speed determines the access of the data on a HDD but SSD access is fast. Booting from a SSD as against booting a PC from a HDD will be a very pleasant expeience. Overall you can expect to get a big boost with SSD in booting, launching apps and move data.
As SSD does not have moving parts, file fragmentation which is a problem with HDD is absent. The Spinning disc has to find the fragmented parts to get the whole picture.
The simple fact that there are no moving parts should assure anyone looking for durability or concerns of noise or heating effects.
SSD's like any solid state memory has a
finite number of read/write cycles .
If you are interested in feature-for-feature comparison go
here.
Presently more computers and laptops come with HDD and not that many with SSD.
