TiVo Community Forums Archives

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

Hard Disk Life
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: AdrianLock

Just a simple question

How long can I expect my 2*120Gig Maxtor dirves to last?

They have been in constant use for over 2 years now and not showing any sign of doing anything horrible.

What are the symptoms to watch out for? Will the death of one knock the other one out? etc etc

Regards

Adrian:)

Posted by: timjon

Taking the points in order...

There's no easy way to determine how long a drive will last, as it depends on a bunch of factors, such as operating temperature, amount of use, whether the drives have been mishandled in the past and so on. I also don't think TiVo supports SMART monitoring, so you're likely to get little or no warning of failure. (SMART monitoring for TiVo would be a superb option, imho... so maybe someone's already done it and I just don't know about it?)

Symptoms are usually things like video locking up or glitching, or (worse) any kind of unusual noise coming from the drives. If you're paranoid, you could pull the drives periodically and run a SMART diagnostic on a PC.

As for knocking each other out, although one drive failing won't physically damage the other (at least, it's very unlikely) TiVo "pairs" the disks together and treats them as one big chunk, so if one fails the other will be unreadable, even though it's probably undamaged. This means you'll lose all your programs and data, even the stuff on the "okay" disk.

Cheers,

Tim.

Posted by: mjk

I have just had the first of my two fail after a couple of years. I started getting daily reboots and running PowerMax revealed that the A drive was near death.

If you aren't getting any problems I would probably leave well alone for now. However, I would check the warrant expiry date on the drives and run PowerMax just before it runs out. Two year old drives should have the old three year warranty. It should be printed on the drive, or you can check the serial number on the Maxtor website. I plan to pull my B drive at the end of theyear and run a thorought check.

Posted by: blindlemon

quote:
Originally posted by AdrianLock
How long can I expect my 2*120Gig Maxtor dirves to last?

Probably not much longer :eek: :(

IMHO Maxtor desktop drives are not up to the rigours of TiVo use. I'm sure they're excellent low-cost drives for desktop PCs - but just not rugged enough for the 24x7 thrashing they get in a TiVo.

Watch out for picture glitches, pixellation, odd errors while scheduling recordings etc. If you don't have a recent backup then I'd advise you make one ASAP.

You could also have a look in the logs for DMA or sector errors etc. IME, Maxtor drives start to fail slowly and just get worse until a critical sector goes missing! Powermax can prolong their life by remapping failed sectors, but, in the end, they lose something critical and the TiVo breaks.

Start thinking about a replacement strategy now. 160gb Samsung drives are getting pretty cheap, and you could transfer your TiVo to 2 of those (just using the 1st 137gb on each) without losing any recordings or having to mess with LBA48 kernels etc..

Also, if you can get the Maxtor drives out of your TiVo before they start to fail you could probably 'retire' them to light duties in your PC for the rest of their natural lives :)

Posted by: jeremy Parsons

A new version of SMART has been compiled and the dailymail_jazz version even does a check to ensure that SMART is working properly , have a look at the dailmail thread for more info