Well, the concept is the same. Regular hard drives are basically spinning platters sort of like a CD a different way of storing the info and they spin a lot faster than a CD. The problem is that the spinning requires power. Not a problem in a desktop (at least not much of one) but in a laptop it cuts your battery life. Also, the slower it spins (and the less energy it uses) the slower your information comes off. Solid state drives are memory like a USB, they dont spin So their advantage is that they drain your battery much less (I think virtually not at all) to use them and they are faster. Main disadvantage is that they are way more expensive in terms of cost per amount of storage.