Solid state drives (SSDs) are memory storage devices that typically utilize NAND flash cells as their non-volatile memory component.  This offers many advantages over the traditional magnetic disk storage drives (HDD), which dominated the market for decades.  SSDs provide significantly faster read and write times, lower power usage, no mechanical (moving) components, silent operation, near instantaneous start-up time, no cooling requirements and smaller physical dimensions.  The stronghold HDDs continue to maintain in the market is COST/GB, which is significantly cheaper than solid state devices, but that gap continues to narrow.

SSDs are rated by the amount of program/erase (P/E) cycles one can expect before there is a physical barrier breakdown in the storage node of the flash cell, which is due to the high voltages required for those operations.  Reading data from the drive requires far lower voltages so this operation does not have the same damaging effect as P/E.  Modern SSDs and operating systems have optimized drive usage so as to spread the wear evenly across the entire device and prevent certain segments from being overly utilized.  Typical consumer drives can be rated up to 3000 P/E cycles, whereas enterprise drives can easily rate well over 10000.