Hi all,

I suspect that my HDD might be about to die .. which is not the end of the world, since they're cheap enough these days, and there's not a lot recorded that I couldn't live without if needs be.

The symptoms are that the playback on my TiVo starts to glitch periodically - I get pixellation, and stuttering in the playback .. it "sticks" or pauses for anywhere from a second to a few seconds and then starts off again. Seems to be getting more frequent too. From what I can tell, this glitching is not always actually present on the recording .. often if I rewind, I can get it to play back without glitching at the same point - although often it will still glitch in the same place.

I've read the various threads on the other Oztivo lists etc, and the consensus seems to be that this is likely the signs of a failing HDD??

Just thought - before I go and get another HDD and image it - I'd post a note in here to see if anyone has had similar symptoms, and whether there is anything else (bad ram etc) that I should check first?

I did see a post about someone experiencing similar symptoms replacing their IDE cable with some success - although I really can't see why/how a cable should suddenly start to degrade all of a sudden?? Sounds more like what a failing HDD would do - like it's "retrying" reads or something? Can't hear any clicking from the HDD or anything audibly wrong though.

The current HDD I'm using is a Seagate 160Gb. I've installed dailymail, and enabled the SMART integration, but the drive doesn't seem to support much in the way of SMART features (like self-test etc), so that doesn't really tell me much about the actual status of the drive ... except that it's there (and I kind of figured that out for myself!!). Before anyone asks - the glitches happened well before the dailymail install. And prior to that I'd made absolutely no changes for ages.

So the questions are:
1) Is there anything else I should check/look out for that might be causing this?

2) If I have to replace the drive are there any recommendations? This one's about 18mths to 2 yrs old, so past its warranty but not _that_ long in terms of HDD life these days I would have thought .. which makes me a little leery of getting another Seagate!! And does anyone have a recommended supplier?

3) Has anyone had any luck removing the drive and using low-level tools (like the Seagate tools) to check and reformat drive before re-using? I'd hate to go through all of that and find the disc is cactus and I end up having to replace it anyway, but on the other hand if it's just a matter of some bad sectors that need flagging, perhaps I can save myself the cost of a new HDD?

Any suggestions?

Cheers

Mark