There are many difference s between solid state and hard disk drives. In order to understand and visualize these differences it helps to first understand the basic differences in technology. A hard disk drive is a high capacity storage device that contains many magnetic plates. Think of these plates as records that hold data. An arm, similar to the needle on a record player, will pull and place information onto the disks.
A solid state drive is also a high capacity storage device, but it holds the data very differently. These drives are built entirely from semiconductors. They store all of the data inside of the conductors in memory chips. Flash drives and RAM is built on this technology as well, but solid state drives are capable of holding much more information in a smaller space.
The biggest differences between the two drive types is that solid state drives lack moving parts while a hard disk drive contains many. The failure rate of hard disk drives is much higher than a solid state drive. Another difference is in storage capacity. At the present time, hard disk drives are able to hold many times the amount of information as solid state drives. This is changing as the cost and capacity of solid state drives changes. Solid state drives also have a higher access rate than hard disk drives, again due to the hard disk drives having moving parts. Lastly, hard disk drives are far less expensive than the solid state counterparts. Based on this information it is up to the user to determine which drive is appropriate for their system.