Microsoft has improved the way Windows 8 inspects hard disk operation and failures, to make it easy to diagnose and repair, despite the fact that the volume of hard disk is increasing.

The improvement of Windows 8 mainly lies in the ChkDsk tool. This tool is to inspect various errors and problems. Even now, it is not convenient to run ChkDsk, because the final user must stop using the machine when ChkDsk is running, and it takes long to scan.

Microsoft also made some adjustment to the NTFS of Windows 8. The “health model” of NTFS regards its hard disk as a single part, no matter whether it’s good or bad. Thus, when ChkDsk is running, the hard disk should be off-line and not able to be provided to users. ChkDsk sometimes has to operate for hours.

Kiran Bangalore, Windows core repository and file system planning supervisor of Microsoft, expressed in his blog on Wednesday, that the downtime has direct relation with the number of files in hard disk volumes. However, in Windows 8, NFTS scans the bugs of the hard disk in the background, while the system is still online. The first try has been accomplished in fixing the bugs while running the system.

Bangalore said that the downtime is called “spotfix”, which only requires several seconds. In the Windows 8 system, we have entirely got rid of the downtime. In such a new model, the offline running time of ChkDsk now has direct relation with the number of bugs, not the number of files.