Sick MacBook Air: Now Dead. Long Live MacBook Air!

Dead. Dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

Before going on vacation to Maui, I was working on backing up all the data from Cindy’s 1st-gen MacBook Air, after her hard disk started flaking out. That effort was thankfully, a success!

Once the backup was done, I booted up my Lion recovery disk, and reinstalled the OS. Surprisingly this worked too, so I copied Cindy’s user folder back over to the machine, and gave it back to her. Then we went on vacation, and we only wanted to bring one laptop, so I added her user folder to my machine.

I had planned on findi ng a utility to sector-test the disk, and hopefully lock out bad sectors, but alas, before I got that the drive seems to have flaked out again. So now my laptop is living at home until I can get a new drive for hers, and get it up and running again.

KingSpec 128GB ZIF SSDWe decided to upgrade with an SSD drive, since slow storage is usually the biggest performance bottleneck for most things normal people do with their computers. I’ll be ordering one today as soon as I figure out which has the best controller and longest expected life. The machine had a 64GB 4200RPM drive before, so we’ll double the capacity to 128GB for what looks like about $200.

Update: After a bunch of research, I decided to go with the Super Talent 128GB DuraDrive ZT2 for about $245 shipped. It’s a little more expensive than the King Spec, but should be both faster, and more heat/battery efficient.

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