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Can Scandisk Damage HD?

R

rodan

Senior member
I recently picked up two pieces of information I'm not sure is valid. 1) Is running "thorough scandisk" on a harddrive, damaging to it? 2) If a computer is improperly shutdown, does this mean the arm or heads in the harddrive, "float"? Meaning, you can damage your harddrive by moving it, IF it's not properly shut down? I find the latter to be a bit unbelievable. I might be convinced "thorough scandisk " might hurt a drive, though.
 
Both of these are false.

1) A 'thorough' scandisk, does nothing that normal use doesn't do. All it does, is read from every part of the HD - in this way it can show up defective areas of the HD.

2) All modern drives have 'self-parking' heads. Older drives had to be shutdown explicitly, so that the heads could move away from the data area of the disks and into a safe landing zone. In modern drives, the heads automatically retract into the landing zone as soon as power is lost.
 
In early dos days there used to be a dos command to park the drive heads. While it was safe to turn off the computer with the heads over any track, transporting it as such could dammage the palatters. Self parking eliminates this problem. Even if you power off without shutting down.

All running scandisk will do is wear away your HD faster. However, since the MTBF is 300,000 hours or so, you should be able to run it a few times a day without worry 🙂
 
Modern hard drives are very adamant about parking their heads. Even if the disk is executing some type of operation, if you pull the power plug it'll snap back into the LZ.
 
Scandisk, just like any other hard drive activity, will indeed wear your hard rive away, just as Moohooya pointed out.

Thorough scandisk even performs surface write testing, so it's even more 'weary' than normal scandisk.
 


<< Scandisk, just like any other hard drive activity, will indeed wear your hard rive away, just as Moohooya pointed out.

Thorough scandisk even performs surface write testing, so it's even more 'weary' than normal scandisk. >>



a thorough doesn't do "special" writing... its the same as reading your whole drive and writing it back. a defrag probably causes more wear and tear, since the head moves back and forth so much
 
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