Just spoke to Apple care and mine is currently in for the replacement.
I was curious to see what they are replacing it with and it wll be another Seagate, essentially like for like.
All they are saying the Seagate's had a faulty batch and that the new one should be fine.
iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
The new ones will be fine, don't worry about it. You can ask the store you took it to what brand they intend to install, once it is returned open System Information and you can tell the brand by clicking Serial-ATA listed under Hardware.
I'm taking my iMac in to have the hard drive replaced tomorrow. How long does it usually take? Same day turn around, or a few days?
It depends on several factors - will the store do it in-store or send it out to an AASP they contract with? Or do you have on-site service scheduled? Do they have a huge backlog? My only experience has been that an auhorized tech will come to my house and do it there - it took him about an hour. We then cloned back my system and had to spend more time troubleshooting because the Mac and my router/modem refused to talk to each other but we finally got it to work. Total time about 2 hours - but again, that was at my house with the tech's full attention on my machine.
Make sure you have a backup (bootable preferred) and erase the disk so strangers won't have access to your files and information.
I took mine to AASP - took 6 working days but they said as they have a backlog it took longer, usually about 3-4 days
Seagate HDD replacement programme
