@Dont Hang Up
State of the art technology does not have to be safe to be installed in your teenage kids' PC. Failures are an inconvenience not a disaster.
Keeping safety critical systems safe means they may run a generation (or two) behind the latest capabilities. That is not a bad thing.
Let's face it, using "current technology" batteries in aircraft has created a few issues recently.
@bsieker
And of course PCs have more memory. They are decades newer and they don't have to survive hours in a kerosene-fuelled fire and/or weeks deep under water. Not to mention a 3500G(!) impact shock and still be readable.
To say that a mechanical magnitic tape recorder is safer and more reliable than solid state is
.
Some military specs for solid state call for 15,000G.
It has already been establised that SSD has been used in CVR, so that negates all arguments about reliability, submertion and G-force.
Only question left is why only enough memory for 2-hours, when 1,000's is inexpensive.
IF reliability of a memory block is a concern look at corporations, governments and militaries that have been using RAID systems for decades, which can incorporate any number of mirror storage devices, so if one fails the same data will be on 1, 2 or 3 other devices.
Unlike a mechanical media SSD can be made fully waterproof by potting.
In the case of MH370 and speculating that it flew for several hours after transmissions stopped, a revolving recording time of only two hours means that some of the most important audio from around the time when contact was lost will probably not be retrievable even if the recorders are found.
How reliable is that?