14 DAY TRIAL // One of Seagate Technology hard drives that come bundled with Apple MacBooks have a critical manufacturing flaw that makes the disk act uncontrollably destructive, either wiping your data or irreversibly compromising it.
The issue was discovered by a data recovery company, Retrodata, that identified the problem in some of Seagate's 2.5-inch hard drives manufactured in China. Retrodata claims that the discs to suffer from this manufacturing flaw are those that use the SATA interface and have a firmware revision of 7.01.
In order to avoid data loss, the same company has advised that, if the laptop is using the Seagate Hard drive that is manufactured in China and features the doomed 7.01 firmware, users should immediately back up the drive and then replace the faulty hardware.
Seagate refused to comment on the issue, but Apple's spokesman Cameron Craig admitted that the company knew about the storage media issues. "We've received a few reports that some MacBook consumer notebooks may have hard drive issues, and we're looking into it," he said.
Retrodata's managing director for the U.K, Duncan Clarke says that their company has identified that the issue lies in the head being detached from the read/write arms. Once "beheaded", the arms carve deep lines in the platter surface. Severe scratches may destroy the hard-drive's unique operating parameters that are vital in the recovery process, which renders the platters useless even for recovery techniques. "I'm working on a fix, but it's going to take some time. I'm not optimistic." , continued Clarke.
It seems that the problem is the result of a flaw in the manufacturing process rather than in the design. Even if it is Seagate to be held responsible for the drives' malfunctioning, Apple is expected to replace the faulty drives at no charge. "It's Seagate's problem, but it's Apple's responsibility to address the problem, since they're providing the part," Clarke said.
This is the second time in a month that world's number one in the hard disc production failed lamentably in respecting quality standards, after supplying brand-new high capacity hard discs already swarming with viruses. Apple shares the same weak position and had to release an update to its Leopard operating system that was supposed to address problems affecting passwords, alerts and partitioning.