My brothers Chuwi laptop had major problems. Now he got a wal-mart gift card for the price he paid for the Chuwi. He is eyeing an HP laptop with 256gb ssd. Is that the same as a regular harddrive?

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) is like a CD, slower but more storage.

SSDs (Solid State Drive) are like flash drives, they are faster but not as much storage.

Also if your drive breaks, an HDD often only fails in part so your data might be recoverable. If SSDs fail, they fail all the way, and there's no way to get it back.

And then there's some quirks about secure delete, fragmentation, the amount of certified writes and things like that, but this is only a broad overview.

Also if you hear internal or external, that means external you gotta plug in via USB, while internal drives you have to open your case, insert the drive and connect it to the mainboard and power supply.

And M.2 drives are just way smaller SSDs that are always internal and they can be a lot faster than normal SSDs, but they need their own special slot on the mainboard.

I hope this helps :)

Also asking for the certified hardware nerds to correct and supplement my comment ^^