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        riddles >> general problem-solving / chatting / whatever >> Scandisk
        
(Message started by: JiNbOtAk on Sep 8^th, 2009, 10:28pm)

Title: Scandisk
Post by JiNbOtAk on Sep 8^th, 2009, 10:28pm

I was discussing our yearly preventive maintenance plan with my technicians, when one of them suggested that we shouldn't perform scandisk so frequently, as it might damage the disc. Now, I'm not really conversant with the internal workings of a computer, but I feel periodical maintenance would be better overall. However, I might be mistaken about this point, so anyone have any opinion on this ? My proposed schedule would be to run scandisk (among other maintenance tools) once a month, whereas my technician suggested twice a year, i.e. once every 6 months. Would running scandisk too often be detrimental to the hardware ? If yes, what's the recommended frequency ?

Title: Re: Scandisk
Post by towr on Sep 8^th, 2009, 11:57pm

If scandisk can damage a harddrive, then there should be evidence for this somewhere. Personally, I can't find any mention of it. So I would ask that technician where he got the notion from.
Aside from reading the disk, I don't see how it would cause extra wear and tear. Then again, I'm no expert either.

Title: Re: Scandisk
Post by SMQ on Sep 9^th, 2009, 5:10am

I have a hard time imagining a way in which scandisk could be damaging to the hardware; it's just a more-or-less sequential read of all the sectors on the disk. Normal file system usage probably causes a greater amount of wear-and-tear than scandisk does. Some more thorough HD test suites include more agressive seek tests which can require a lot of head movement in a short time. Perhaps your technician was thinking of one of those?

--SMQ

Title: Re: Scandisk
Post by rmsgrey on Sep 9^th, 2009, 8:24am

Modern hard drives have all sorts of intelligent technology built in to try to handle problems without needing to trouble the rest of the PC - scandisk won't see any bad sectors until the drive's own firmware has used all available spare sectors for remapping. A better indicator for modern drives is the SMART reporting - the drive firmware's report on the drive's status.

A good general principle at all levels of IT is to avoid duplicating the automatic processes of the low-level firmware or OS kernel in your own work - in this case, you're probably better off looking into the drives' built-in error detection and failure prediction and using that where available rather than running your own checks (that won't detect indicators that the firmware has already detected and transparently compensated for anyway) on top of what the drives are doing anyway...

Title: Re: Scandisk
Post by JiNbOtAk on Sep 13^th, 2009, 8:44pm

on 09/09/09 at 05:10:23, SMQ wrote:

Normal file system usage probably causes a greater amount of wear-and-tear than scandisk does.

That's my initial opinion too. Although, in hindsight, my technician could just be too lazy to perform the whole maintenance schedule, thus came up with that idea in the first place. ::)