News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

November 28, 2007

troubleshooting

Apple investigating hard drive issues

Posted Nov. 28, ’07, 8:49 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Troubleshooting

System ProfilerThere’s been some buzz on the Interwebs about problems with certain batches of hard drives in MacBooks failing. Failing badly. Affected drives, which appear to be Seagate brand with a firmware version of 7.1 7.01, have mechanical failures in their read/write heads, causing them to gouge the hard drive platters, likely irreparably.

Says Apple:

“[We have] received a few reports that some MacBook consumer notebooks may have hard drive issues, and we’re looking into it.”
Trying to figure out if you’re at risk? You can find out about your hard drive in the System Profiler application, which resides in the Applications/Utilities folder. If you click on the Serial-ATA section under hardware, you should see information on your internal drive. Of course, I’m not sure exactly what you should do if you find out you have a potentially affected drive that hasn’t yet gone bad. Except back up now and regularly (which you should be doing anyway, of course).

Hey, I’ve got a Toshiba. Phew.


7 Comments

Nathan said:

I had an iBook with a Toshiba Hard drive in it, that failed and was replaced with another Toshiba that failed.
So I don't trust Toshiba Hard drives.

November 28, 2007 9:28 AM
PT said:

Yes Apple has received a few reports - and they have deleted reports in the Apple discussions so there are fewer reports.

November 28, 2007 9:42 AM
Kaulana Author Profile Page said:

Oh god, EVERYTHING toshiba makes is udder crap, IMHO. Back before I saw the light that is OSX, I bought a laptop and external DVD / CDR drive in 2001 and both items were broken within 3 months. Their "customer service" reps made me feel like it was mine and MS's fault that their crappy computer wasn't working. Eventually they replaced my laptop after it had been sitting there being useless for over a month, and then that replacement drive and computer once again petered out within 5 months time. Thankfully, the best buy I ordered it from heard my tech horror story and replaced my Toshitba with a fairly reliable gateway that still lives to this day.

November 28, 2007 9:54 AM
dvashawn said:

These afflicted drives are also in some mac minis. Although they might be less prone to failure since they aren't moved around as much.

November 28, 2007 10:16 AM
Paul Whitelock said:

The firmware revision of the suspect drives is 7.01, not 7.1.

November 28, 2007 10:42 AM
Dan Moren Author Profile Page said:

@Paul: Whoops, thanks. What a difference a "0" makes, huh?

November 28, 2007 11:29 AM
Nicolaj Nielsen said:

My drive died 3 weeks ago, and sure enough, it was one of the affected models. You can also check the model number to see wether you are at risk: ST96812AS and ST98823AS are the culprits, according to the firm that first discovered the problem: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/30/apple_seagate_drive_warning/

November 28, 2007 12:41 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: