A British hard drive recovery company believes they’ve found a defect in Seagate 2.5-inch SATA drives shipped in MacBooks. The drives are not specific to Apple, but because Apple is one of the primary companies that ordered the drive, it appears to be hitting Apple systems the most.

The drives all shipped with firmware version 7.01, and this can be checked inside Apple System Profiler. The people that found it have gone as far as to suggest replacing the drives proactively (even without any recall in effect), and are saying that Apple should initiate a recall immediately.

Having had one of these drives fail under those exact criteria… I’m taking this one personally. I want my $22 for an advanced Seagate RMA back. My Seagate OEM 100 GB 7200 RPM hard drive that I had in my last MacBook died in exactly the manner that this “future recall” dictates.

Apple, do the right thing and bring customers into the loop as to the failure rate. I’m sure Apple’s new general council can apprise Apple on what could happen if they don’t. Paying customers for lost data can get expensive… but, in fairness to Apple, it’s possible they didn’t know the root cause of the failures until recently.