[pchelpers] Re: SpinRite or Scandisk

Hi Ekhart,

Sunday, April 24, 2005, 3:04:03 PM, you wrote:

>> What is happening which makes it necessary at all? You should NOT be
>> regularly getting bad spots, lost clusters, cross-linked files, etc.,
>> unless you play soccer with your computer or lose power frequently.

EGlnl> Since you are surely not saying what this sounds like - no need
EGlnl> to ever run it - what *are* you trying to say? How often would
EGlnl> you recommend running ScanDisk/CheckDisk?

You should not NEED to, unless the system crashes or the power goes
out (or flickers or browns) or the system gets sluggish out of the
blue (due to a bad spot) or some such thing... but for the sake of
paranoia, you probably should run every 2-3 months at most, with the
exact timing depending upon how often problems are found when you do
manual scan; you'd want to do it more often if you're experienced at
crashing your system.  :)

Windows XP seems to be relatively good about forcing a scan when it
thinks the drive might be corrupted or when it has trouble reading a
sector.

The 9x versions of Windows are another matter entirely; I'd suggest
scanning those no LESS often than about once a month.

Keep in mind that hard drive manufacturers quote a MTBF of around
500,000 hours, which works out to about 57 years if the drive runs 24
hours a day. This only measures certain types of failure, though; I'd
be amazed to see a hard drive actually run for anywhere near that
long. In reality, you shouldn't be surprised if your hard drive dies
or gets flaky within about 5-7 years. Keep in mind that warranties on
many OEM drives is 3 years, and warranties on many retail drives is 1
year. There seems to always be at least one brand/line notorious for
dying well inside the warranty period.  If you have one of these, you
should scan weekly, if you're not able to find an excuse to get a
refund.

-- 
Scott.




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