If you are looking at a modern laptop, chances are you will see some that come equipped with a solid state drive. Solid state drives have several advantages over the magnetic hard drives. The majority of this comes from the fact that the drive does not have any moving parts. While a traditional drive has drive motors to spin up the magnetic platters and the drive heads, all the storage on a solid state drive is handled by flash memory chips. This provides three distinct advantages:

• Less Power Usage
• Faster Data Access
• Higher Reliability

Because there is no power draw for the motors, the drive uses far less energy than the regular hard drive. Since the drive does not have to spin up the drive platter or move drive heads, the data can be read from the drive near instantly. Hard drive platters are very fragile and sensitive materials. Even small jarring movements from an impact can cause the drive to be completely unreadable. Since the SSD stores all its data in memory chips, there are fewer moving parts to be damaged in any sort of impact.