SSD (solid-state drive). The device that replaced hard drives. It consists of a set of chips (flash memory and controllers) on a printed circuit board. Unlike a hard drive, it does not contain electric motors and generally operates faster, quieter, and sometimes even more reliably, as it eliminates the need to spin up the disks and position the magnetic heads.
These devices also have their drawbacks, which are partially compensated for by a controller that accounts for wear on the memory cells. Reliability, in general, depends on the quality of manufacture and the conditions of use: as with a hard drive, a properly manufactured drive can last for several years with proper use, while a counterfeit one may stop working the very next day.
Therefore, the best strategy is to have a spare drive and periodically back up important data. SSDs do not require defragmentation. In addition, defragmentation can damage it due to the large number of cycles of rewriting data in memory cells.
There are several varieties of connecting an SSD to a computer and several options for the appearance of the device. For example, designed to be installed directly on the motherboard M2, variants with a SATA bus in a case resembling a 2.5-inch hard drive or an external device connected via a USB interface.
Already an old Intel solid-state drive (SSD)