The Windows 8 beta has been out for quite some time now. However, many final features have yet to be announced, and many are expecting some serious changes to be implemented before the operating system’s launch later this year.
Two of these changes were announced today: Windows 8 is going to feature extended support for chkdsk and NTFS health. If you don’t know what either of those two applications are, then they basically work in tandem to keep your hard drive operating smoothly. Chkdsk scans your hard drive if an error ever occurs, or if a file ever becomes corrupted. Meanwhile, NTFS is the storage system that designates most hard drives.
As hard drives get larger and larger, each of these applications have shown their age. Many of today’s 3.5” hard drives are around 2TB in size, and the chkdsk utility simply isn’t designed to handle drives of that volume. If it does have to scan a disk of that size for errors, it could take hours to complete a scan, leading most users to exit out of the program before a scan is complete.
Windows 8 plans to change all that. Instead of relying on users to perform the chkdsk application whenever something goes wrong with their hard drvie, the NTFS system will have built-in active scanning capabilities that instantly tackle hard drive problems at the source. This troubleshooting takes place in the background of your computer’s normal operating and consumes a minimum amount of resources.
Once the NTFS system has troubleshooted the problem, it sends the error log to chkdsk, which will then use that information during its next scan.
What does this mean for users?
Everybody loves having a clean, fast, and healthy PC. Microsoft is taking steps to make sure that everybody has this experience with Windows. Although no operating system is error free, your hard drives will still be much safer when using Windows 8.
Just because the chkdsk utility is outdated today doesn’t mean that it is completely useless. Open up a run command and type in chkdsk and press Enter. Or, in Windows 7, go to your search bar and type in chkdsk. This will tell you what kind of data storage system your hard drive is using, and it will also alert you to any errors that are currently affecting your computer.