A Solid State Disk (SSD) is frequently looked upon as the next generation of storage devices which will eventually replace the hard disk drives (HDD) you find in computers. SSDs are a form of flash memory storage. The only difference is that SSDs are much larger in capacity than flash memory cards that we are accustomed to. When compared to HDDs, they are slightly faster in write performance but more than 100 times faster in reading data. Since SSDs have no moving parts, they suffer from significantly fewer failures, are noiseless, generate much less heat and drain at least 70 per cent less power. Though flash memory has been in use for digital devices for a while, its SSD avatar is still considered new-tech and is rather expensive to buy. Windows 7 will be the first Microsoft OS to officially support it. SSD capacities are also currently fairly limited in capacity as compared to HDDs. One thing is for sure, if it gets cheaper to upgrade to an SSD you will get significantly more performance improvement.