In a statement, the company agreed that a tiny number of users of Apple's MacBook Pro that installed the drive as an upgrade were experiencing unexpected performance hiccups, beeps, and a refusal to spin down in power-saving mode.

The company recently released a new firmware update, SD24, to address the issue which is available from . This should also have resolved a less severe issue experienced when using the XT on some Windows PCs, Seagate said.

However, Seagate's technical staff still appear to be troubleshooting blue screen of death (BSOD) and performance issues when using the XT on Windows and Apple PCs even after the SD24 update installed.

Despite the company's assertion that only a small number of users are affected, the support forum has a lively group of threads covering problems experienced by users.

"We have encouraged all users to ensure they have SD24 loaded on their drive while Seagate engineers continue to work to isolate the MacBook Pro symptoms and provide a fix in another firmware revision," read a Seagate statement.