Hi,

Long story:
My MacBook's hard drive failed one year ago, just a month after its warranty ended or: a year and a month after I bought it. After about ten phone calls to Apple's service, they agreed to extend the warranty for another year, so that I got it replaced free of charge.

In the mean time, I got to know that many MacBook users that experience/report hard drive failures.

• Every reported crash was preceded by
  • a slowdown of system performance,
  • an increased occurrence of the spinning beach ball wait courser, and
  • frequent crashes of applications that used to run very robust until then.
• It happened (as far as I know) with MacBooks from 2006/2007.
• All these MacBooks additionally suffer from a recurring wearing down of their "top case".
• Many heavy users had to replace their HDDs three time since 2006/2007
• resulting in an head crash, making it impossible to recover data (diagnosis of recovery specialists)
• in most but not all cases HDD was Seagate (doesn't necessarily have to be the cause, if majority of the MacBook charge contained Seagate drives)

And right now (one year after my first disk crash), these symptoms are cumulating on my system, again ...

Short version:
prevalent hard drive failure on MacBook charge from 2006/2007 (i.e. 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Due)

• I am looking for any (preferable open source) tool for checking the hard drive condition, especially to detect the known "MacBook problem". So, that I can replace the disk on time.

• If any Mac user found a solution to prevent the repeated failure of heir hard drive, I would be very glad to get to known it.

I really enjoy my old MacBook, but I hate to get interrupted every year by an HDD crash.

BTW, the issue is already in discussion for a long time, but there seems to be no solution, so far.

Thanks,

Simon