Why are SSDs so much faster than traditional hard drives?

The answer

Traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) store data on spinning magnetic platters read by a mechanical arm - fundamentally limited by physical movement. Solid-state drives (SSDs) use interconnected flash memory chips with no moving parts, accessing any data location in roughly the same time. This gives SSDs read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s (NVMe) versus 200 MB/s for HDDs, boot times measured in seconds instead of minutes, and far greater shock resistance. SSDs are also silent, lighter, and consume less power, though HDDs still offer cheaper cost per gigabyte for mass storage.