Are Solid State Drives safer than conventional mechanical hard drives?

[Robert Seltman]

I am trying to decide which is better for my daughter, Mac Air or iBook, both are priced the same.
Is the Mac-air solid state drive less likely to crash?

[Denny Crane]

I am trying to decide which is better for my daughter, Mac Air or iBook, both are priced the same.
Is the Mac-air solid state drive less likely to crash?

It should be -- but only actual data on failure rates can give ability to predict.

Solid state or flash drives have been in development for quite a while now. I think all of us have heard of some failures in thumb drives, so I expect some in the larger ones. Nonetheless, HDs have moving parts and I personally have experienced several failures of those.

Norm

[Col]

Both conventional mechanical hard drives and solid state drives have their strengths and weaknesses.

A solid state drive (SSD) is much less likely to be damaged by mechanical shock as there are no moving parts. Then again in the event of a drive failure, the drive in the MacBook Air cannot be replaced because the "drive" is mounted directly on the motherboard.

While the life of USB thumb drives is rather poor - you generally want to replace them after 2-3 years of use - we cannot predict SSD durability from them because although they use the same multi-level cell technology, the SSD uses wear leveling software to stop wear being concentrated on the just a few cells and large numbers of spare cells to replace the functionality and save the data of cells which start to fail.

Unless you have a high-end USB thumb drive and/or one employing the single-level cell technology, they are also rather slow whereas SSDs are much faster than conventional hard drives. At a KMUG meeting where he demoed his MacBook Air for us, Tony spoke of very short boot and application launch times. Apparently this speed advantage is reduced somewhat as the drive is filled - easy as SSDs have significantly lower capacity unless you pay a lot more.

SSDs are still fairly new, so the MacBook would be the more conservative choice, and it is a fully-functional computer with an optical drive capable of processing HD video and the like. On the other hand, the MacBook Air is about extreme portability - easy on your daughter's back and shoulders