Defective MacBook Pro Hard Drives?

[lcoughey]

Here at Recovery Force, we have started to notice a trend in that MacBook Pro Seagate hard drives have been failing. It would appear that we are not the only data recovery lab to notice this trend. The Register has a report about Retrodata challenging Apple & Seagate with their findings.

If you are running a MacBook Pro or any other system, for that matter, and you are concerned that your critical data may be at jeopardy, we suggest you backup your data immediately and have your local technician test your hard drive. In the event that you don't have a local technician, call Recovery Force and we will direct you to someone in your area that we know and trust.

[lcoughey]

I had someone who has already had three systems fail, ask me what I recommend in order to test their hard drive and avoid future problems.

Apple Hardware Test - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303081
Disk Warrior - http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
SMART Reporter - http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/s ... orter.html

At the very least, the SMART Reporter would be a good start. I've installed it on my system, as well. Hopefully you won't experience a drive crash and, if you do, I hope that that SMART Reporter will report it to you before you lose your data.

[lcoughey]

In follow up to this report, we've determined that the problem lies more with the user and not so much with the hardware. That is, the user closes the lid of their MacBook / Laptop, forcing it into sleep mode. But, before the system has time to properly power the hard drive down, the user starts moving the system around, bumping the hard drive and causing the system to crash.

It is difficult to tell when a system is ready to move. Apple makes this easier with a white light on the front of the MacBook. When the light goes from being solid to a slow flash, it is ready to be moved around.