Solid-state drive in the context of SanDisk

A desktop computer, often abbreviated as desktop, is a personal computer designed for regular use at a stationary location on or near a desk (as opposed to a portable computer) due to its size and power requirements. The most common configuration has a case that houses the power supply, motherboard (a printed circuit board with a microprocessor as the central processing unit, memory, bus, certain peripherals and other electronic components), disk storage (usually one or more hard disk drives, solid-state drives, optical disc drives, and in early models floppy disk drives); a keyboard and mouse for input; and a monitor, speakers, and, often, a printer for output. The case may be oriented horizontally or vertically and placed either underneath, beside, or on top of a desk.

Desktop computers with their cases oriented vertically are referred to as towers. As the majority of cases offered since the mid 1990s are in this form factor, the term desktop has been retronymically used to refer to modern cases offered in the traditional horizontal orientation.

A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box, possibly in a disk enclosure for portability.

Hard disk drives were introduced by IBM in 1956, and were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like mobile phones and tablets, rely on flash memory storage devices. More than 224 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation, most units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly (by exabytes shipped), sales revenues and unit shipments are declining, because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, somewhat better reliability, and much lower latency and access times.

Solid-state electronics are semiconductor electronics: electronic equipment that use semiconductor devices such as transistors, diodes and integrated circuits (ICs). The term is also used as an adjective for devices in which semiconductor electronics that have no moving parts replace devices with moving parts, such as the solid-state relay, in which transistor switches are used in place of a moving-arm electromechanical relay, or the solid-state drive (SSD), a type of semiconductor memory used in computers to replace hard disk drives, which store data on a rotating disk.

In computing, mass storage refers to the storage of large amounts of data in a persisting and machine-readable fashion. In general, the term mass in mass storage is used to mean large in relation to contemporaneous hard disk drives, but it has also been used to mean large relative to the size of primary memory as for example with floppy disks on personal computers.

Devices and/or systems that have been described as mass storage include tape libraries, RAID systems, and a variety of computer drives such as hard disk drives (HDDs), magnetic tape drives, magneto-optical disc drives, optical disc drives, memory cards, and solid-state drives (SSDs). It also includes experimental forms like holographic memory. Mass storage includes devices with removable and non-removable media. It does not include random access memory (RAM).

ExpressCard, initially called NEWCARD, is an interface to connect peripheral devices to a computer, usually a laptop computer. The ExpressCard technical standard specifies the design of slots built into the computer and of expansion cards to insert in the slots. The cards contain electronic circuits and sometimes connectors for external devices. The ExpressCard standard replaces the PC Card (also known as PCMCIA) standards.

ExpressCards can connect a variety of devices to a computer including mobile broadband modems (sometimes called connect cards), IEEE 1394 (FireWire) connectors, USB connectors, Ethernet network ports, Serial ATA storage devices, solid-state drives, external enclosures for desktop-size PCI Express graphics cards and other peripheral devices, wireless network interface controllers (NIC), TV tuner cards, Common Access Card (CAC) readers, and sound cards.

Non-volatile memory (NVM) or non-volatile storage is a type of computer memory that can retain stored information even after power is removed. In contrast, volatile memory needs constant power in order to retain data.

Non-volatile memory typically refers to storage in memory chips, which store data in floating-gate memory cells consisting of floating-gate MOSFETs (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors), including flash memory storage such as NAND flash and solid-state drives (SSD).

The gigabyte (/ˈɡɪɡəbaɪt, ˈdʒɪɡəbaɪt/) is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix giga means 10 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB.

This definition is used in all contexts of science (especially data science), engineering, business, and many areas of computing, including storage capacities of hard drives, solid-state drives, and tapes, as well as data transmission speeds. The term is also used in some fields of computer science and information technology to denote 1073741824 (1024 or 2) bytes, however, particularly for sizes of RAM. Thus, some usage of gigabyte has been ambiguous. To resolve this difficulty, IEC 80000-13 clarifies that a gigabyte (GB) is 10 bytes and specifies the term gibibyte (GiB) to denote 2 bytes. These differences are still readily seen, for example, when a 400 GB drive's capacity is displayed by Microsoft Windows as 372 GB instead of 372 GiB. Analogously, a memory module that is labeled as having the size "1GB" has one gibibyte (1GiB) of storage capacity.

The Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S are the fourth generation of consoles in Microsoft's Xbox series, succeeding the previous generation's Xbox One. Released on November 10, 2020, the higher-end Series X and lower-end Series S are part of the ninth generation of video game consoles, which also includes Sony's PlayStation 5, released the same month.

Like the Xbox One, the consoles use an AMD 64-bit x86-64 CPU and GPU. Both models have solid-state drives to reduce loading times, support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and spatial audio, the ability to convert games to high-dynamic-range rendering using machine learning (Auto HDR), support for HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate and low-latency modes, and updated controllers. Xbox Series X was designed to nominally render games in 2160p (4K resolution) at 60 frames per second (FPS). The lower-end, digital-only Xbox Series S, which has reduced specifications and does not include an optical drive, was designed to nominally render games in 1440p at 60 FPS, with support for 4K upscaling and ray tracing. Xbox Series X/S are backwards-compatible with nearly all Xbox One-compatible games and accessories (including Xbox 360 and original Xbox games that were made backward-compatible with Xbox One); the newer hardware gives games better performance and visuals. At launch, Microsoft encouraged a "soft" transition between generations, similar to PC gaming, offering the "Smart Delivery" framework to allow publishers to provide upgraded versions of Xbox One titles with optimizations for Xbox Series X/S.

PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe, is a high-speed standard used to connect hardware components inside computers. It is designed to replace older expansion bus standards such as PCI, PCI-X and AGP. Developed and maintained by the PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group), PCIe is commonly used to connect graphics cards, sound cards, Wi-Fi and Ethernet adapters, and storage devices such as solid-state drives and hard disk drives.

Compared to earlier standards, PCIe supports faster data transfer, uses fewer pins, takes up less space, and allows devices to be added or removed while the computer is running (hot swapping). It also includes better error detection and supports newer features like I/O virtualization for advanced computing needs.

The ninth generation of video game consoles began in November 2020 with the releases of Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Series S console family and Sony's PlayStation 5.

Compared to the eighth-gen Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the new consoles add faster computation and graphics processors, support for real-time ray tracing graphics, output for 4K resolution, and in some cases, 8K resolution, with rendering speeds targeting 60 frames per second (FPS) or higher. Internally, both console families introduced new internal solid-state drive (SSD) systems to be used as high-throughput memory and storage systems for games to reduce or eliminate loading times and support in-game streaming. The Xbox Series S and the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition lack an optical drive while retaining support for online distribution and storing games on external USB devices.

A disk enclosure or desktop hard drive is a specialized casing designed to hold and power hard disk drives or solid-state drives while providing a mechanism to allow them to communicate to one or more separate computers.

Drive enclosures provide power to the drives therein and convert the data sent across their native data bus into a format usable by an external connection on the computer to which it is connected. In some cases, the conversion is as trivial as carrying a signal between different connector types. In others, it is complicated enough to require a separate embedded system to retransmit data over connector and signal of a different standard.