Although it doesn’t appear to be a widespread problem, Apple said it has “received a few reports that some MacBook consumer notebooks may have hard drive issues, and we’re looking into it.”
Apple didn’t say which drives could be affected, but UK-based Retrodata reported earlier this year that Seagate 2.5-inch drives with firmware revision 7.01 are causing potential data loss. “The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable,” the company reported.
You can check your firmware revision in the System Profiler application.