Surface Scan

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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