What is the difference between SATA, SSD and HDD?
The differences between solid-state drives and hard drives can be summed up in three categories: hardware, data storage, and price.
The main distinction is that mechanical hard drive disks store data on spinning platters while SSDs use either chips generally of flash memory or a traditional rotating magnetic disk to save data. Mechanical disks provide faster access speeds but slower write rates than the alternatives.
A recent survey from Gartner forecasts a dramatic rise in adoption of SSDs this year with global shipment increasing over 50% against last year to 79 million units (2014). This number is expected to rise by another 25% next year when new PC systems are shipped with 12x the current average integration or 16%. That’s slightly more than the 40% of systems currently with SSDs.