Surface Scan
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
Fri Dec 12 16:03:01 CST 2003
Rusty wrote:
> --- Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins at tarcanfel.org> wrote:
>> On Thursday 11 December 2003 03:29 pm, Leo J Mauler wrote:
>>
>> > Surface scan is like the sector tests performed during a format,
>> and it
>> > remaps the hard drive to compensate for any new bad or failing
>> sectors on
>> > the platters.
>>
>> But Leo, it can't do that on an IDE drive where the sectors are all
>> virtual
>> entities mapped by the firmware on the drive.
>
> And yet that's (my understanding of) what scandisk does as well. What
> would be its purpose if it couldn't find and map around bad sectors?
>
> It is a Windows utility, and the majority of those installations are on
> IDE drives, so it "makes sense" that it would function on those drives.
I think you all are somewhat missing the point. Even if the drive
automatically remaps all sectors and scandisk sees nothing wrong, the
simple fact of accessing the *ENTIRE* drive contents will trigger the
drive's built-in error re-mapping to fix or remap 'marginal' sectors, so
whether scan-disk is flagging sectors bad in the partition tables, or
the drive is re-mapping on it's own behind the scenes, the net result is
the same.
I also wouldn't entirely discount the possability of the end-user
actually running something like a defragment utility rather than just
scandisk, which would have obvious potential to speed up the system.
--
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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