F-ing hard drive!

I own a MacBook - the original series Core Duo based (therefore already obsolete as it is 32-bit not 64-bit) from June of 2006. Despite problems with it (the Ethernet's never worked but I don't need that and I had to get a new battery) I like it as a laptop although I do think my old laptop - the 12-inch PowerBook G4 - was possibly the best Apple laptop ever (I'm happy that it's gone to a good home - my Mum's).

However, in under 2 years that I've owned it I have suffered 3 hard drive failures - complete failures (head crashes). The deadly sound of a clicking hard drive (yes, I had an Iomega Zip Drive too!). The first just a few months after purchase (replaced on warranty), the second just as the warranty ran out (I did get a second replacement on warranty), and now the third yesterday.

Each failure occurred after a few hours of use on a reasonably flat surface while the computer was still. I've never been one for bumping my laptop around.

Apple must know about these faulty hard drives - there's even been a story or two about them. Despite this, every time I reported my hard drive failure to Apple they sent me a new model of exactly the same hard drive. As mentioned in the article - the techie says if you have one you may as well buy a replacement before you lose data.

Fortunately, I've had backups (thank you SuperDuper and now Time Machine too) - which became more and more important as I owned this MacBook. Apple's discussion boards mention bad luck - I work in Mac technical support and, while you may have platter problems on your hard disks, you rarely have whole drive failures so bad you can't actually access the disk. In an office of a couple of hundred (now aging) Macs, I've probably only seen a full hard drive failure once. Usually it's just having the platter going bad slowly.

This time I didn't try and get my hard drive replaced on warranty - I didn't want another doomed-to-fail duplicate of the ones I'd already received (3 failures in 2 years must be a record) and, it has to be said, I wanted a bigger hard drive. I picked up a Hitachi drive from the local PC World (after the local independent Mac shop tried to assure me that an external hard drive was an internal one), loaded it on, and restored from a 40 day old Time Machine backup. The only painful bit is I now have to load up Windows again as my attempts to back that drive up failed again.

Macs are promoted as places to store your music and your photos. Well, if you do - BACKUP! And if you own a first generation MacBook backup LOTS and preferably replace your hard drive while you can still do it at your leisure - do a Time Machine backup, swap drives, restore from Time Machine backup or do a SuperDuper clone, swap drives, restore from the clone (possibly easier).

Read that story now and check your System Profiler (Apple Menu>About This Mac>More Info then check under Serial ATA drives) to see if you've got the same model hard drive (I think later model MacBooks used different drives). If you do - change!