A solid state drive (SSD) is a data storage device using flash memory chips rather than the spinning magnetic disks of traditional hard drives. SSDs offer significantly faster read and write speeds, lower power consumption, greater durability (no moving parts to fail), and silent operation. These advantages make SSDs standard in modern laptops and increasingly common in servers and data centres. SSDs have higher costs per gigabyte than traditional hard drives, though prices have declined substantially. Computer upgrades often involve replacing hard drives with SSDs for improved performance. Government IT systems benefit from SSD speed improvements for database operations, application loading, and general system responsiveness.