Apple has acknowledged to InformationWeek that it has received reports of MacBook hard drive failures and is looking into the problem.

Seagate was not immediately available for comment, but Apple spokesman Cameron Craig said the company was aware that there might be a problem. "We've received a few reports that some MacBook consumer notebooks may have hard drive issues, and we're looking into it," he said.

UK data recovery firm Retrodata earlier this month discovered a flaw in the some hard drives employed in Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro computers. The firm's analysis at that time had indicated that Seagate hard disks in the models with firmware 7.01 were unusually prone to read/write head failures that caused physical gouges in the hard drive platter, making recovery impossible.