[X4U] Macbook drive failures.

[Stroller]

I have used the data recovery specialist RetroData once myself, and  
at least one of my customers has been very happy indeed with their  
service. Retrodata is a one-man band and he has a very good  
reputation on the uk newsgroups for trustworthiness, expertise &  
reliability.

I stumbled across this announcement on their webpage today:
   http://www.retrodata.co.uk/notice_apple_seagate_drives.php

    The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5" drives that are  
manufactured in
    China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA
    interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.

    We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly
    all 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.

    Should you have one of these drives in your system, we believe the
    problem is serious enough to warrant copying all your data off the
    drive and replacing it with an alternative drive, or a retail- 
version
    Seagate drive.

I read this that there's no problem if your MacBook drive isn't the  
Seagate firmware revision 7.01, so if you keep any important data on  
your laptop (I don't) it might be worth removing it to take a look.  
Removing the drive is quite straightforward on the plastic MacBooks  
<http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/MacBook_13inch_HardDrive_DIY.pdf>

Stroller