Grumpy_Mike:
The whole point about a Macbook Air is that it does not have a hard drive in it!!!!
I share your annoyance at the vague description of the events and the technology involved, but since this was in a post criticizing casual inaccuracy... 
Up until 2010 many Macbook Airs had magnetic hard disk drives. So it's not unlikely that college student could be using a Macbook Air from a few years ago with an actual HDD.
Also, while it is very inaccurate to call a solid-state drive a "hard drive", it's an understandable confusion for non-technical people (just like calling an entire desktop or tower case full of specific computer component's a "CPU"). It's worthwhile to correct this inaccuracy of course, but maybe not quite so much vehemency. 
If kevinkroon was making this mistake, having an SSD might make catastrophic failure more likely because SSDs are constructed using either flash memory or DRAM ICs.