TiVo Community Forum Archive 1 (http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/index.php)
- TiVo Underground (http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/forumdisplay.php?forumid=8)
-- Maxtor Drive utilities. (http://archive.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?threadid=24183)

You can try PowerMax. Unfortunately, my experience is that every disk diagnostic utility I've tried virtually never tells you about anything other than catastrophic surface problems (bad sectors, etc). They will NOT tell you when the disk is operating marginally.

I've had to replace my 80gb maxtor twice now. When the first one went bad, the stutters became painfully noticeable. You could hear the drive heads clicking when they encountered surface problems.

So I plugged it into a PC and ran PowerMax. The drive audibly struggled. After it was over, what did PowerMax say? "Your drive is factory certified in good condition". Geez. That makes me feel REAL confident about Maxtor's quality standards.

IBM's "Drive fitness utility" is just about as useless. With my bad 45gb drive, it kept informing me of bad sectors. It just kept telling me to reinitialize the disk (presumably to mark the sectors as bad). Of ourse, that didn't work too well since it'd always find more bad sectors. With the drive I got on replacement, there was clearly something wrong with it also. I heard funny noises from the heads. DFT said it was fine. A couple days later, it died completely. I now trust my ears more than DFT.

I have a couple other upgraded TiVos with similar 80gb maxtor drives with no problem so far. I hope they keep going. My confidence with large drive technology is pretty awful right now.