Nice process or not, the completion time of fsck on any disk and any FS
varies greatly depending on the options used. In particular, using -c
for a surface check (where it is available) comes at the expense of
orders of magnitude longer completion times in comparison to usage
aiming at only verifying the FS itself (without scanning the surface for
defects). Obviously the minimum time for a comprehensive surface check
depends largely on the size and speed of the disk as it generally
involves reading the whole lot, whereas a simple fsck only looks at the
FS and ignores the actual "payload" data stored on the disk. The fsck
default is to check the FS without checking the surface, and this is
very reasonable for the regular checks done from time to time according
to the main purpose of fsck. It does make sense, though, to include a
surface check option when formatting a disk to ensure that any bad
blocks are found and mapped out (look for the -c option again in mkfs...
). That obviously leads to a long completion time for mkfs -
no-free-lunch here.
And then there are the different kinds and flavours of file systems,
journaling or not, etc. and fsck checks any FS according to that FS's
specific properties, so that different FSs on the same model and size of
disk would take different completion times...
If you are mainly interested in the disk's general state of health and
any recorded failures, use SMART ... smartctl I believe from memory.
That doesn't scan anything but simply provides access to the disk's
SMART data. But it can also be used to initiate SMART procedures. More
detail in the smartctl man page... and most disks in operation these
days probably have SMART support. BTW, you can also run a SMART daemon
(smartd) to capture any alerts from the disks and raise the alarm as
soon as something is detected...
Kind regards,
Helmut.
On 18/02/16 21:41, Peter Simmonds wrote:
Hi All,
On that note, is there a better alternative? Big hard disks are here
to stay.
Cheers,
Peter
On 16/02/2016 19:46, Jim Cheetham wrote:
fsck isn't a nice process for large disks. I wouldn't be surprised if
it took a day or so for a 1TB disk.
You can safely stop the job; but it won't resume from where it left
off; it'll start again.
Reformatting may be a better option.
-jim
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