Solid state disc drive

Computers have a (secondary) storage device called a disk drive, It is where all your apps are stored. There are currently two types of storage device, the magnetic hard disk drive and the solid state disk drive.

A computer (unopened)
A computer (opened) - SSD shown
SSD removed

How does a solid state drive work?


  1. When you take the cover off a solid state drive, you will see NAND flash memory cells (as below)
  2. Inside NAND flash memory cells are billions of "Floating gate transistors"
  3. Floating gate transistors (are a bit like cups that) hold electrons
  4. If one floating gate transistor contains electrons, the computer reads it as a "zero". If another floating gate transistor is empty of electrons, the computer read it as a "one"

​NAND flash memory (the black chip)

Examples of solid state media

Memory card and and smart phone memory
USB memory stick
Tablet computer memory