A new NTFS health model and updated chkdsk tool in Windows 8 work together to resolve corruption issues much faster than previous versions of Windows.
In a recent post on the Building Windows 8 Blog, Senior Program Manager, Windows Core Storage and File Systems, Kiran Bangalore, discusses a new NTFS health model and redesigned chkdsk (check disk) tool coming with Windows 8 that can detect and fix data corruption issues much more quickly than Windows 7, and presumably older versions of Windows.In the post, some examples are given that show Windows Server 8 recovering from issues in less than two seconds, where it took Window Server 2008 R2 up to six hours. “One of our key design goals for Windows 8 was to increase availability and reduce the overall down-time of systems;” says Bangalore, “this feature, along with other storage features such as Storage Spaces and the new ReFS file system, helps reduce the complexity of fixing corruptions and increases the overall availability of the entire system.” If the kind of speed improvements mentioned in the post prove true in real work situations, overall availability will most certainly be improved.
The supposed speed and availability improvements come by way of a number of new enhancements to the way the file system reports errors and chkdsk handles them. The Online self-healing capabilities of Windows 8 have been enhanced to handle more issues. In addition, a new Online verification service is able to distinguish from memory errors that may or more not have caused actual on-disk corruption. New Online identification and logging capabilities also trigger an online scan of the file system, which runs as a maintenance task in the file system, and a new “spotfix” tool can referenced that logged info and more quickly recover from corruption issues.There is a video in the post that shows Windows 8’s new chkdsk utility in action, side by side with a Window 7 system. It’s not terribly exciting, but the improvement coming appear to be worthwhile. Nobody wants to deal with corrupted files or volumes, but if the situation arises in Windows 8, it appears that at least the repair process will be a bit more painless than with previous editions of Windows.
