By Chris Nicholls
BRITAIN: UK data recovery company Retrodata has claimed a number of Seagate 2.5 inch hard drives used in Apple’s Macbooks have a manufacturing flaw that causes read/write heads to fail and scratch deep lines in the platter surface.
The scratches render the hard disk “practically unrecoverable”, the company said in an announcement on their website.
The hard drives in question all use firmware revision 7.01 and all use a SATA interface. The company said no other hard drives seem affected at this stage.
Retrodata advised Macbook owners to check their drive status via the System Profiler program. Owners can look under ‘Serial-ATA’ for the firmware code. Retrodata advised customers to back up their data or switch hard drives as a precaution.
While Retrodata claimed Apple should issue a product recall, no such recall has been forthcoming as yet.
Apple Australia did not respond to phone calls for comment prior to publication.