How do Platter and Solid State drives work?
Platter disks use a rotating disk with one or more platters and a magnetic recording head that creates tiny magnetized domains on the disk surface. These can later be read back. Solid state disks are essentially flash memory, but of a type that can be written and read much more quickly. Since they have no moving parts, they use less power and can be faster than rotating disk storage But they are currently very expensive. The cheapest 80 GB SSD costs over $100. For that price, you can get a 1.5 TB hard drive. Nevertheless, the SSD prices are dropping and it offers an attractive option for configuring your computer with a small SSD for OS and paging storage, and a much larger hard drive for data storage.
