Macbook Air SSD Failure rates

[XgeorgeX]

I'm debating on getting the 13 inch MBA and 13 inc MBP for my wife. I am really leaning towards the air because of the size since my wife and I travel a lot. She will just being using it for browsing the internet, email, word documents, and possibly Netflix.

My personal experiences with SSD drives haven't been very good. The few that I have had failed within the first few months and everyone I know that has an SSD had the same issues. Reading online the failure rates are really high for SSD drives. I've been trying to find anyone talking about the failure rates for the MBA SSD but can't find anything. I assume that I can't find anything about it means that it really isn't a problem. However I want to make sure I wouldn't have been better off with the MBP instead of the air because we are constantly replacing the drive.

I tried searching this board for things related to this topic and I didn't find anything really answered my question.

 

[Beau10]

I honestly can't remember ever seeing someone post about a failed solid state blade used in the Macbook Air over the past couple odd years I've been skimming this forum. Not saying it doesn't happen as it surely does, but it just doesn't seem to be a prevalent issue. SSD failure rates were very high in the first few years (ie. circa 2k5 - 2k8 or thereabouts) then they seemed to improve dramatically to the point where my take at the time is that they became more reliable than rotational media.

I guess I'm on my 4th in a way - had Intel X25Ms both on my personal and work machines and those went thru serious abuse. Subsequently had a 2010 11" MBA w/ 64G and now a 2012 11" MBA w/ 128G. Never had a problem. Then again, I've only had one hard drive failure after having owned some 20+ disks since purchasing my first PC in '89 and I've been a professional software engineer since '96... maybe I'm just super lucky.

If you're really this worried, keep in mind that Apple Care will cover it and make sure to use Time Machine to an external drive in case the worst happens. That said, I'd be surprised if SSD failure rates as a whole aren't much lower than traditional rotational media at this point in time.

 

[nuckinfutz]

The failures have largely been constrained to those products that haven't used stable controllers.

Apple uses Toshiba and Samsung. Both stable controllers.

Intel makes stable controllers. Sandforce had issues with some of their controllers. Indilinx had issues.

I trust SSD far more than HDD at this point.

 

[XgeorgeX]

Thanks for the replies. That pretty much confirms what I was thinking with the MBA "drives" since I wasn't finding anything on it.