The article states they have seen many dozens of these hard drives.

Given that Apple sells millions of these a year, what's the failure rate? Is it still acceptable WRT other mfg's?

Guess I should see what drive is in the wife's Macbook before I catch h***. :)

I have had numerous clients with Macbooks experience these catastrophic failures. In one instance the hard drive was replaced by Apple a second time following a failure. I now make a point of checking all Macbooks to ensure a Seagate is not fitted and backup and replace them if they are.

Yeah removing those 3 screws to get the the hard disk on a MacBook is sooooo hard, and so is pulling out that sliding drive caddy on the Mac Pro, considering I work on projects worth tens of millions of dollars, that investment of $150-$175 a year is chicken feed.

I guess it all depends on how much your data is worth to you. Replacing hard disks and doing backups sure saves me hours of reloading systems from scratch. One of the biggest problems in the computer industry right now is people failing to take responsibility for their own data backup. I see it every day at the service center I work part time at. Data backup on a Mac is easier than any system out there, and with free applications like Super Duper and Carbon Copy Cloner, I can't feel all that sorry for people that go for extended periods of time without some kind of backup.

iMacs use 3.5 inch drives, these problems are exclusive to the 2.5 ince drives.

Yeah removing those 3 screws to get the the hard disk on a MacBook is sooooo hard, and so is pulling out that sliding drive caddy on the Mac Pro, considering I work on projects worth tens of millions of dollars, that investment of $150-$175 a year is chicken feed.

Well, I guess it helps you have the only machines apple makes where changing the hard drive is easy.

For the mini, MBP, and iMac, these are NOT considered user-replacable parts by Apple. And none of these are as easy as the two you chose to mention. Its especially laughable that Apple also makes it easy to replace a hard drive in their consumer laptop (because consumers only need 13" screens), but don't make it easy on the pro laptops (because pros need big screens, not piddling 12" ones), where there's more of a need/desire to replace something quick.

Heaven forbid anything's easy to swap like a good ol' Dell business laptop, where you not only can easily pop and change the hard drive, you can do the same for the CD-drive, so you can possibly use the bay for something else.

But that would require some hideous lines on the outer case, and we all know that, since looks are everything, no one would buy such a mac.

I guess it all depends on how much your data is worth to you.

No, the point is how much is data worth to a company of MBs out there. If you're a single person, maybe its no big deal. Doing this yearly on 30 computers? It adds up.

The iMac has freezing problems. The Macbooks have bad hard drives. Yikes, what's going on? Hi, I'm a Mac, cough, cough, help!

"Heaven forbid anything's easy to swap like a good ol' Dell business laptop, where you not only can easily pop and change the hard drive, you can do the same for the CD-drive, so you can possibly use the bay for something else."

There are no Good Dell laptops - they are all utter garbage and have no quality whatsoever. Even HP learned how to make a great laptop - they hired IBM's Thinkpad design team. Dell didn't hire anyone and the craekiness, flexability, and general cheeziness of their laptops shows after 1-2 years.

My system profile says:

Model: ST9160821AS

Revision: 3.CAE

Is my HD one of the crappy ones?

Even if your laptop is out of warranty, the drive inside might not be. It's worth contacting the manufacturer to check; many drives have three or five year warranties.

"I now make a point of checking all Macbooks to ensure a Seagate is not fitted and backup and replace them if they are."

Yeah, because all Seagate drives are automatically bad.

Don't be ridiculous. If it's in the affected range, replace it. Seagate makes fine drives - apparently there was a bad batch. It happens.

The fact of the matter is No one one is responsible for backups but the user, and it isn't like Apple purposely put bad hard disks in their computers, this isn't nearly as bad as the Beige G3s that had enormous problems with Western Digital drives. I replaced over 50 of those.

I do manage over 100 Macs currently and we replace drives on average every year, some go longer some go shorter we keep the old drives as backup drives, they are used less often, so wear and tear is not a big issue, any new drive fails, put their old one in or use the backup on the old one to image a new one, saves lots of time. But I was in charge of nearly 800 at the University I attended during the time those WD drives were going bad 10 years ago, but guess what, no big deal because I had a backup plan and disaster scenario in place. It took me less than a week to deal with that and I was a full time student at the time, they still use that scenario I developed today, and hard drives are a lot cheaper now.

To average consumers: Hard drives are cheap and they are also the part most likely to fail on ANY computer, if you can't change it out yourself, there are all kinds of places that will do it for less than $50. Again, how much is your data worth to you? More than $50?

I'm just sick of the whiners.

Re: Remember OEM hard drive warranties expire when the unit's warranty expires, Seagate typically offers 5 years, but in this case when the unit is out of warranty, the drive is too, unless the manufacturer releases a repair extension on specific parts.