As far as I can tell, they’re both forms of data storage, but a 1TB flash drive is about $25 cheaper and like 1/10th the size of a 1TB external hard drive. Why would you opt for an external hard drive over a flash drive?
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HDDs (Hard Disk Drive) have disks, just like name implies. That disk has all data stored. To read specific info, we have to have reader over that part of disk. That one reader has to be able to read data from any place in the disk. It’s done by having stationary reader and rotating disk.
Now, if we want to read data from that disk, we have to wait until part of disk with wanted data is under reader. It may be the smallest time period ever, but it’s not zero. Multiply that by trillions of read operations and you get quite significat time passage.
SSD (Solid-State Drive) uses semiconductors to store data. Impprtant thing is that time we need to access any of that semiconductor is the same and we don’t have to wait idly.
As you noticed yourself, disks are cheaper than semiconductors, they also last longer. But the speed factor is more important for many people.
There are also other factors, like data fragmentation. If I want to read 100 bytes of data from HDD, it would be nice if these bytes are one after another. In worst case scenario, bytes are reversed: I read one byte, then I need to wait for disk to make almost full rotation to read the next byte, just because of the way it was stored. That splittinf one file into separate sections and having them in a messy way is data fragmentation. SSD don’t have that problem. I mean, they do have data messed around, but since read time is constant, it does not create any problems no matter how messy it gets.
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