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If you don't know the meaning of the above letters, they are abbreviations for two types of storage units (hard drives).

HDD stands for Hard Disk Drive, and its Arabic translation is 'suqat al-qars al-salb' (meaning hard disk).

As for SSD, it stands for Solid State Drive, and its Arabic translation is 'shaghala suqat al-hala al-sulbah' (please ignore the previous two translations).

Mr. Mufreh asked in the comments the following question:

"On some devices, next to the hard drive you find the term SSD... what does it mean... and which is better, it or traditional disks? ... Best wishes."

Most of us first learned about SSD storage with the launch of the MacBook Air, and it is used in netbooks (small devices with 9-inch screens or less). It is simply flash memory units (like those in your phone, memory cards, and USB storage devices) combined to form a large capacity (as in the image above, the lower device).

Advantages:

Faster than traditional disk drives.

No moving parts, so performance is unaffected by device vibration.

Uses less power (longer battery life).

Lighter weight.

Smaller size.

Silent operation.

More heat resistant than HDD storage.

Longer lifespan (2 million hours vs. 700,000 hours for HDD) (MTBF lifespan of SSD is 228 years, while traditional is 79 years!).

Disadvantages:

Very expensive (a 64GB HDD costs less than about 130 riyals, while the same capacity SSD costs about 750 riyals).

Capacity is still low.

The disadvantages of SSD will disappear over time, capacities will increase, prices will drop, and old drives will vanish.

I hope this topic answered brother Mufreh's question.

Raed Al-Saeed sent an email. Last updated: May 24, 2009.

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