Apple Recalls Some iMac 1TB Drives; Free Replacement In Tow

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Apple has some bad news for certain iMac owners as the company decided to recall a “very small number of Seagate 1TB hard drives” which were used on 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs sold from May 2011 to July 2011.

The iMac line has been recently refreshed and this hard drive issue is certainly surprising. We haven’t received any tips suggesting that the 1TB Seagate hard drives are defective, so we may be looking at a minor issue that needs correcting. Apple doesn’t explain what the problem is, but it does mention that your defective hard drive will be replaced free of charge:

Apple has determined that a very small number of Seagate 1TB hard drives used in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac systems, may fail under certain conditions. These systems were sold between May 2011 and July 2011.

Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) will replace affected hard drives free of charge.

Apple is contacting affected iMac owners who provided a valid email address during the product registration process to let them know about this program. If you have not been contacted, but think you have a 1TB Seagate hard drive, you can enter your serial number below to see if it’s part of this program.

Before you go ahead and schedule your appointment with Apple to have your faulty (or not-so-faulty) Seagate drive replaced make sure you backup all your data. And while you’re testing your hard drive, let us know whether there any serious issues with it that affect your whole iMac performance.

While Apple is certainly downplaying this recall by telling us that a “very small number” of HDDs “may fail under certain conditions” there’s no way of telling how widespread the issues are and what causes them. We will note however that last time Apple’s iMacs had significant issues (remember those yellow screens that annoyed iMac users about a year ago?) the Internet was filled with reports detailing said problems. So this time around we must be really looking at a very limited number of affected iMacs.