Glossary

SSD is short for "Solid State Drive." An SSD serves the same purpose as a (hard drive|hard drive), but uses flash memory rather than spindle of magnetic disks. It is called a "solid state drive" because it has no moving parts. Since SSDs do not need to move a physical drive head to read data, they can access data faster than hard drives. They also do not need to be defragemented, since their performance does not depend on where data is stored on the disk. Since solid state drives have a number of advantages over hard drives, they have begun to replace hard drives in laptops and other devices.