Reported Seagate drive failures may affect Mac laptops

Heat does not equal hard drive failure. Google proved that with statistics of hard drive failures vs. temperature at their own data centers.

Geez. Just happened to me today. I have this same drive. Guess I'm buying a new one tomorrow, and paying for a decent backup software. Ugh.

I hope none of you are using those keyboard "skins" on your Macbooks, because the keyboard is the cool air intake. Macbooks are already too warm on the inside, and heat = hard drive failure. Remember, there is no hard drive temperature sensor in these things. People report having multiple HD failures on the same computer... hmm... 1) don't use macbook on a cloth surface 2) use smcFanControl to increase the fan speed 3) keep the bottom as open as possible (try elevating) 4) don't play games.... :-)

I have this Seagate 60GB HD in my MacBook.
Come on Apple, do the right thing and replace these drives. You don't want your numerous new customers who bought into your Intel Macs to have a bad experience with their first Mac do you?

The Seagate Momentus 80gb ST98823AS fw7.01 died in my MacBook the day after the warranty expired! (Aug 2007) Apple did nothing except advise me to buy a new drive from somewhere else as theirs were expensive! So I bought a 160gb Hitachi. The seagate just stopped working and clicks. Bertie, UK.

My June 2006 Macbook hard drive died in December 06, but has been replaced with one of these bloody Seagate things, what a pain, I'm going to be forever holding my breath now, waiting for it to go wrong.

Had a ST98823AS go belly up...no backup. My bad. Even sent out for recovery and was willing to shell out the $1800 for recovery. The gouges were so deep and the residue it left on the rest of the platters made it a complete, no recovery at all, loss.

Who should I bitch to? Apple? [it was 1 month out of warrany]. Seagate?

Had the same drive in my MacBook. It died while sitting on the desk in my hotel room in Macau uploading photos from my Thailand trip to Flickr (which is how I was backing up my photos). Lost over 900 photos from my time in Thailand a few days prior (I take abut 300 pics /day). Thankfully I had been regularly uploading to Flickr or I would have lost about 4000 pics. Sadly, though, the Thailand pics were the best ones :(

There was absolutely no warning that the drive was going to fail and when it did the fan kicked on real high and the system became unresponsive. Upon restart it gave me the flashing folder with a question mark on it and the drive would click a few times before going silent.

We've had about 15 fail in our office (we've probably got about 100 MacBook's or so, not that that's indicative of a percentage because we probably buy 10 MacBook's a month).

Tried to get data recovered on a couple and couldn't.

I'm using an Intel Mac Mini, and System Profiler says

Model: ST98823AS
Revision: 7.01

Would I be affected too, despite this not being a MacBook, but having the same firmware (7.01) as what is reported on the Retrodata website?