[Marisa Ross]

Disk drives are essential for long-term computer storage. There are two main types in use today: hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs). HDDs utilize magnetic storage with spinning platters and mechanical components, offering large capacities at lower costs; however, they are slower and more prone to failure due to the movement of these components. SSDs, on the other hand, use flash memory with no moving parts, making them faster, quieter, and more reliable. Common SSD types include SATA SSDs, which are faster than HDDs but limited by the SATA interface, and NVMe SSDs, which use the PCIe bus for extremely high speeds and low latency. Most NVMe SSDs are installed in M.2 slots on modern motherboards, though some come as PCIe expansion cards. These drives are ideal for gaming, content creation, professional workloads, and servers needing rapid data access. Some SSDs also feature onboard cache to store mapping tables and frequently accessed data for improved performance.