As laptop form factors continue to decrease in size, optical drives become increasingly rare and these SSDs proliferate.
Generally, the drive will be referred to by its capacity and rotational speed.
Solid-State Drives
Solid-state drivesare starting to replace hard drives in more laptops, especially ultrathin laptops.
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They providefaster data access, lower power consumption, and higher reliability.
The downside is that SSDs don’t come in such large capacities as mechanical hard drives.
Plus, they usually cost a lot more.
Some companies are referring to these as just hybrid hard drives.
They help speed up tasks such as booting up a laptop but they aren’t always faster.
In fact, this form of drive is best used when a limited number of applications are used frequently.
The most common form of this uses the Intel Smart Response Technology.
DVD writers are pretty much standard for laptops that have an optical drive.
They can fully read and write both CD and DVD formats.
Now that Blu-ray has become thede factohigh-definition standard, more laptops have these drives.
Blu-ray combo drives have all the features of a traditional DVD burner with the ability to play Blu-ray movies.
Blu-ray writers add the ability to burn lots of data or video to the BD-R and BD-RE media.
Laptop drives are generally much slower than similar drives found in desktop systems.
Drive Accessibility
Drive accessibility is important when considering whether to upgrade orreplace a damaged drive.
For instance, the 2.5-inch drive bays used for hard drives and solid-state drives can come in several sizes.
