What did Apple know and when did it know it?
Last weeks hard drive meltdown hit me pretty hard, but it looks like it wasn’t entirely a surprise to everyone. Patrick emailed me a story today, claiming
Apple was aware of flaws in many MacBook drives but has so far kept silent on it.
The affected drives — model numbers ST96812AS and ST98823AS — are commonly found in notebooks such as Apple’s MacBook or MacBook Pro, the firm says. To determine whether a MacBook has one of the affected drives, it’s suggested that owners go to their Mac’s System Profiler application and check the revision number under the Serial ATA listing.
If the System Profiler indicates that the computer is using a Seagate hard drive with firmware Version 7.01, Retrodata recommends backing up all data and then having the drive replaced.
I can’t say whether my old hard drive was one of those listed; it’s on its way back to the Apple factory (required under my AppleCare warranty). But the symptoms are familiar:
As part of its continued coverage of the vulnerability, Retrodata this week said it continues to receive “quantities” of the affects drives for recovery, nearly all of which display the same cause of failure — the read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable.
That would probably explain the clicking sounds the drive made while running.
Sure would have been nice to have this information three weeks ago. The new hard drive is nice, but maybe Apple can give me back those videos of my grandparents. Time to go back stuff up.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
seldom Chinese ppl use Apple, we think it is 2 expensive & it tries to control its customers, what a pity.
December 10th, 2007 at 12:54 am
i checked my macbook a few days ago, and it turns out i have one of those potentially flawed Seagate drives. What to do? After browsing the Apple support forums, it seems all that one can do is hold tight and hope ur one of the lucky ones. not all of those Seagate drives with that serial number and revision number fail, they’re just failing at an exceptionally high rate. So it still sucks. And it’s a bit of a lottery.
December 17th, 2007 at 12:22 am
H-
Funny you say that…I use Windows and the reason I want to switch to Apple is that I think Microsoft tries to control its customers…the reason I haven’t switched yet though is Apples are definitely still too expensive.
December 28th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
well, well, well. my macbook has died. well, the flawed Seagate drive in it has, totally at random, with just a few ominous clicks as it’s minimalist death rattle.
it’s about 15 months old, and I didn’t get AppleCare, so i’ve gotta scour some computer shops here in suzhou for a new HD to stick in it. luckily i backed up my personal stuff, but neglected my blog and magazine material.
so, i guess i won the dead HD “lottery” i mentioned 3 weeks ago in the comment above!
December 30th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
@Steven,
Sorry to hear that. At least you were backed up. New hard drives aren’t too pricey, usually, and certainly cheaper than reclaiming the lost memories.
Good luck.