hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
HDD is like a CD, slower but more storage.
SSDs are like flash drives, they are faster but you not as much storage.
Also if your drive breaks, an HDD often only fails in part so your data might be recoverable. If SSDs fail, they fail all the way, and there’s no way to get it back.
And then there’s some quirks about secure delete, fragmentation, the amount certified writes and things like that, but this is only a broad overview.
Also if you hear internal or external, that means external you gotta plug in via USB, while internal drives you have to open your case, insert the drive and connect it to the mainboard and power supply.
And M.2 drives are just way smaller SSDs that are always internal and they can be a lot faster than normal SSDs, but they need their own special slot on the mainboard.
I hope this helps :)
Also asking for the certified hardware nerds to correct and supplement my comment ^^
Corno@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
Can confirm the thing about failing HDD’s. Both of mine are failing but one is significantly worse than the other, things fail in certain parts, like entire folders, or just a few corrupt files. When I’ve had flash drives go bad it’s catastrophic (which is why I have like five of them oop)