Rugged laptops use Solid State Disk (SSD) as hard drives instead of the usual conventional disks. Hard drives used in rugged laptops are not regular hard drives, with spinning platters. Solid state disks use non-volatile memory such as flash or volatile memory such as SDRAM.

Non-volatile memory SSDs retain memory even during sudden power outages, ensuring data retrievability, a good advantage when you are using rugged laptops that you operate in difficult situations.

SSDs don't have any moving parts, so they tend to be more solid and at the same time more silent than regular disks. An other thing that makes a SSD stand out of the rest of the regular hard drives is the price, which is significantly higher than the rest.

Using a SSD is more secure from this point of view than a regular disk. A regular disk can only be protected from vibrations and shocks by some procedures such as wrapping the hard drive with a soft, thin, pliable, jell-like material. This material absorbs a lot of the shock induced by vibrations, drops, hits, etc.

Flash SSDs are extremely fast since these devices have no moving parts, eliminating seek time, latency (there is no read/write head to move) and other electro-mechanical delays inherent in conventional disk drives. They are also more rugged than hard disks and offer greater protection in hostile environments.

Flash-based means that it uses flash technology to erase blocks of memory before writing to them. Solid state disks have limited lives based on the fact that they have a limited erase cycles.

Some features that recommend SSDs for usage in rugged laptops the fact that solid state disks can endure wider temperature fluctuations in the environment, does not heat up, is totally silent, is lighter, and uses very little power.

Due to the fact they use little power make SSD the hard drive of choice for rugged laptops, extending the laptop autonomy. Rugged laptops are often used outside the office, far from a power supply, so the battery life is a crucial feature and using Solid State Disks as hard drives became a wise decision.