macdad08 wrote:
My daughter's 18 month old Macbook just died at college. (No extended warrenty was purchased) At a Best Buy (groan) she was told the HD was dead and that it would take $1600 MINIMUM to retrieve the data and then they sold her a new blank HD for $80. I find this VERY hard to believe. $1600? To retreive data? Come on. She is sending me the old HD and I'll be taking it to the local Apple Store for evaluation.
Has anyone heard of such a thing? How could a HD just die for no apparent reason?
I welcome all comments.
Yes - hard drives can up and die without warning. It's the nature of the technology. A hard drive is a mechanical device which is equivalent to an airliner flying mere millionths of an inch from a canyon wall. There are safeguards to prevent head crashes, but there are still failures from time to time. I've experienced several and had some in my workplace go bad. A warranty on a hard drive is more or less a promise to replace a dead drive and not a guarantee of reliability.
A simple backup is rather inexpensive and not that hard to implement. External hard drives are inexpensive means to create an exact copy of a working hard drive, and replacing a MacBook hard drive is trivial compared to previous Apple notebook computers.
It's remarkable that they're as reliable as they are given the price and capacities. They aren't infallible. Ask any IT manager.
