What is a Solid State Drive (SSD), and what are the options for SSDs inside a MacBook Air?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqjRTjkipp0[/youtube]

Transcript of the video:

There are two kinds of drives you can have inside your Mac laptop, unless you have a MacBook Air, in which case you only get a choice of one kind of drive. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

There are solid state drives and there are traditional moving parts drives. That’s not really what they’re called but I’m calling them moving parts drives because they are spinning aluminum platters with little magnetic heads that float above them, not unlike a record player.

The thing about SSDs (solid state drives) is that they’re crazy fast, and they’re more reliable because there’s nothing that can mechanically break down, which happens all the time with regular drives.

The downside to SSDs is that they are much more expensive per gigabyte. You pay much more for the relative storage you get.

The new MacBook Airs are very very thin. One of the ways Apple got that thinness was to design their own custom drive module that is only SSD. So MacBook Airs have no moving parts, other than the fan that spins inside them.

We had one client who wanted both the speed and the capacity in a tiny computer. So she got an 11″ MacBook Air and she got the 480GB (the largest you nag get) SSD drive from OtherWorld Computing for that machine, which cost as much as the computer itself.

She now has a 2.3-pound computer with a lightning-fast, ultra-thin drive.