Apple announces 27-inch iMac 3TB Hard Drive Replacement Program

Apple has determined that a very small number of 3TB hard drives used in 27-inch iMac systems, may fail under certain conditions. These systems were sold between December 2012 and September 2013. Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider 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 3TB hard drive, you can enter your serial number to see if it’s part of this program here.

So 15-18 gigabytes per patient? I got two knees x-rayed from a few angles and the CD they gave me was not more than 40mb. I copied the contents onto my computer and cloud backup.

Still having reading comprehension? "Patient database including 3D radiography" not per patient. Try reading what was written, not what you think was written. 3D radiography of a skull include up to 360 slices through the head to be assembled into a rotational view. It is much larger package, depending on the degree of detail required. Doing custom osseous integrated implants for single surgery insertion requires accuracy to fractional millimeters so the pre-designed and manufactured implant will perfectly fit on the exposed mandible at time of surgery. Our doctors do NOT want to be doing revisions to titanium or Vitalium while the patient is under anesthesia. They would be very pissed off to have to do that.

We had been sending our custom implant patients out to a specialized radiological lab to have this 3D work done but it usually wasn't covered by any insurance and cost them $600-$1000 out of pocket. The machines that the X-Ray labs had used to cost between $1-2 million. We wanted to save our patients that money and looked around for a more economical means. The technology called Cone Beam Computerized Tomography (CBCT) was was finally developed and we decided to be pioneers and buy one.

Several years ago we uninstalled and returned a $360,000 3D X-ray after purchase because it could not survive contact with even a single patient.

To get our money back, we literally had to sue the maker and seller of the supposedly "certified medical equipment" maker! The makers, who must remain nameless according to the suit settlement, stupidly designed this CBCT so that it could never survive patient contact, mounting the fiberglass sensor cowling to the sensor pickup itself (!) and every time a patient even touched the cowling (unavoidable) the CBCT was put out of calibration by several millimeters, resulting in GIGO! Calibration required a visit by a trained technician about three hours to do properly, but we discovered, that often merely remounting the cowling was sufficient to put the CBCT out of calibration, because the very act of screwing the cowling back on would put it out of calibration. DUMB design.

In fact, when we, after realizing the CBCT was completely un-usuable for precision implant work, we opened it up and discovered that the maker had merely taken an industrial product CBCT (!) used for checking internal flaws in manufactured goods, turned it upside down (all the labeling was upside down) and hung it from a mechanism to turn it around a human head! The sensor supports were the same as those designed for the industrial CBCT in the proper right-side-up orientation which relied on gravity for much of the stability of the original design of the system. Inverting it worked against that stability! Totally stupid to think that inverting a system designed for a gravity supported system would work when turned upside down, but that's what they did! Now we are talking terminally STUPID in engineering terms! I am certain that PA Engineer would be glad to confirm our evaluation of such an idiotic design decision.

We now have one that cost us $200K less that is robustly built and designed for patient contact. We had to wait a few years for economies of scale to drive prices down and more companies to enter the market, We can now do in house for $250 what our patients had to pay $600 to $1000 for. . . but under law, we have to keep the scans on file—and backed up so that an hard drive crash won't lose them—which before had been handled by the radiological labs. That takes hard drive capacity.

We used to be able to purge such records after 10 years. With Obambicare, we have to keep them until the sun is a burnt out cinder.

My needs aren't as critical as yours. I just bought WD 6TB black, for $199 each. I reformatted for Mac, installed WD software and drivers. Their WD utilities for Mac was causing the drive to shut down after a minute while I accessed the drive, not nice; reconnecting would repeatedly shut down. I deinstalled the WD Drive Utilities, rebooted and the drive works fine - problem with the utilities which I don't need anyway. Something to take note of for others installing on Macs with Yosemite OSX. Now copying data from the Seagate 3TB to the WD 6TB. The Seagate will be relegated to less important use. Thanks for the tip to go WD.

Sounds like you've found the best solution. I think the Fujitsu's may have the best failure rates, but I won't buy Fujitsu anything as they were involved in the Clinton transfer of US quiet Submarine secrets to the Chinese back in the 1990s.

Yikes! 6TB hard drive. Most I would need is one terrabyte

People with Macs tend to do a lot of video editing, the Mac environment is great for that. Through the years I accumulated a lot of home movies taken on HD cameras. It takes a lot of space to edit and splice them together, storing multiple versions. Plus relatives trade home movies. It all gets saved. Not only do I film family events, but also film documentary clips on projects I do. For instance, over 15 years ago I filmed a teardown and rebuild of an engine in my vintage '60s car. Same for a frame-off restoration. Comes in handy if a repeat project is done. Done videos on my carpentry hobby, as well as on computer builds and backyard projects.

Then there is my extensive commercial movie collection, all in HD. I have many thousands of family pictures, going back to the early 1950s. Most I scanned and digitized, until going digital in the mid-90s. Still have that Kodak digital camera with a floppy disc drive; those pictures suck compared to later cameras. Plus an extensive music collection.

I learned long ago, you can never buy enough space. Sooner or later you will need more. I have a 5MB hard drive sitting around, it seemed like plenty in the early '80s.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.