4 ms·

If windows took hours to chkdsk (that's the term used under Windows, not fsck), it means it was (is?) something seriously wrong with your hardware and/or filesy

If windows took hours to chkdsk (that's the term used under Windows, not fsck), it means it was (is?) something seriously wrong with your hardware and/or filesystem. Normally, it took few minutes. The only way to avoid slow chkdsks in the future is to fix the underlying issue. Also note that I'm not telling you to upgrade. I know that it is impossible with systems that have lab equipment attached. If you want support from the vendor, that is. So the question is, why don't you ask the vendor for support? This is in their scope. Also, it was very easy to have damaged HFS+ and not know about it. There was a thriving market of third party utilities (Disk Warrior & co) that would gladly tell you and fix it, but most users didn't use them.

jjoonathan 6y ago
The oscilloscope doesn't take hours to chkdisk, it takes ~5 minutes, which is bad but completely typical of my other experiences with Windows 7, so what should I expect the vendor to do about it? Other than try to sell me a new one that runs Windows 10 for another $40k, I mean? :] The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way. Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults. In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.

jjoonathan 6y ago

The oscilloscope doesn't take hours to chkdisk, it takes ~5 minutes, which is bad but completely typical of my other experiences with Windows 7, so what should I expect the vendor to do about it? Other than try to sell me a new one that runs Windows 10 for another $40k, I mean? :] The computer that used to take hours to chkdisk was a home computer with a couple 1TB (IIRC) 5200RPM drives containing a lot of files. Chkdisk didn't typically find errors and Windows small-file-access is notoriously slow. I don't think this is a "me" problem or a "my hard drive" problem, I think it's a "chkdisk is slow and obnoxious" problem. Windows users just put up with it and didn't resent it as much as I did because they didn't know there was a better way. Apple cited journaling as the feature that let them drop the slow checks. Maybe that was puffery. Maybe it was uninformed risk tolerance (the NTFS ecosystem has an ecosystem of recovery tools too, so that's hardly an indication of anything). Or maybe it was informed risk tolerance, or better journaling, or better defaults. In any case, the point holds: Windows was first across the "technological accomplishment" finish line while Apple was first across the "relevant to me" finish line, and that seems to happen a lot, even though I have feet firmly planted in both ecosystems.