Most modern laptops are moving away from mechanical drives in favor of more durable and smaller solid-state options. As laptop sizes continue to shrink, optical drives are becoming increasingly rare and SSDs are on the rise.

Hard drives are still the most common form of storage in a laptop and are quite simple.

Generally, the drive is referred to by its capacity and rotational speed. Larger capacity drives tend to perform better than smaller drives, and faster spinning drives tend to be more responsive than slower drives compared to drives of similar capacity.

However, slower HDDs have a slight advantage when it comes to laptop longevity, as they consume less power.