Following up on assorted complaints that the MacBook laptop may contain hard drive issues, Apple yesterday stated that the company is looking into the problem.

According to Macworld UK, UK-based Retrodata has reported that the Seagate 2.5" hard drive containing firmware revision 7.01 has been known to cause 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. The hard drive's firmware revision can be checked in Mac OS X's System Profiler application.

In many cases, it's difficult to pinpoint specific hard drives with design flaws due to the high volume of faulty disks encountered.

"Damage to magnetic platters are a normal type of failure for laptops," said Alkas Ali, a director for data recovery firm DiskEng. "This can be caused by temperature related issues or if the read/write head oscillates." However he conceded that if the read/write heads are detaching from the arm, that is a design flaw.

He also warned that you would need to see several hundred or several thousand drives with this problem to know for sure there is a design flaw.

Stay tuned for further news on this issue as it becomes available and if you've seen the problem on your end, let us know in the comments or forums.