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While taking a closer look at Task Scheduler in 8.1, I came across a task called "Data Integrity Scan". Its description is: "Scans fault-tolerant volumes for latent corruptions", but under "Status" it appears as "Disabled".
However, in the "Trigger" tab, it appears as "Enabled" and is configured to run every four weeks beginning 01-01-2011 at 23:00 hours. "Last Run" time shows as "Never", probably because the laptop is only a couple of months old.
There's very little in the way of information available on the subject (typical Microsoft) and this site is the only one I could find with any kind of detail pertaining to that particular task: http://www.nirsoft.net/dll_information/windows8/discan_dll.html
Here's a screenshot of the "Edit Trigger" menu with its current (default) settings, but these might only be intended as a guide.
I'm wondering whether or not to enable it, or simply to run SFC as and when it may be required.
What do you guys think?
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
Answer accepted by question author
Hi,
Data Integrity Scan: Scans fault-tolerant volumes for latent corruption. It checks the data for any corruption due to possible hardware failures like hard drive failure. It will be triggered during the system failure caused by hard drive.
You may however run the System File Checker (SFC) scan to repair missing or corrupted system files.
Hope it helps. If you have any further issues on the computer, please post your question related to Windows and we will be happy to help you.
The previous response isn't that helpful. The "Data Integrity Scan" scheduled task actually is specifically for ReFS resilient volumes:
The Data Integrity Scan scans through all disk sectors that back a ReFS volume. If any data corruption has occurred (i.e. bit rot), it will attempt to repair the corruption; this only works if the volume is a mirrored storage space (it may work on parity spaces, too).
It won't do anything if you aren't using ReFS. Because the task has to read all of the data in a ReFS volume, this can take a very long time and be quite disruptive if you are doing other tasks that access the disk heavily. I believe this is why the task is disabled by default on Windows client systems.
Not quite correct. It runs on Hyper-V (Server) VMs, which are backed by whatever storage underneath... It runs on both drive C: and a Data-drive D:, both of which are NTFS. This is not ReFS only for sure. My take is this is a task that does scrubbing like MS does for Data Deduplication, it scans the entire volume for currption of any kind it understands, and logs the problems found so a checkdisk can take those logs and spotfix the problems, leaving only the problems left which have to be dealt with (and will be dealt with) during a reboot. This in essence replaces the very long wait on a reboot with a chkdsk scheduled on MS OS below 2012. Problem with this is that it takes quite some IOps and lots of CPU in the VM which thus severy limits consolidation in number of VMs per host. I disable this task on VMs since it really adds little to nothing on a VM hosted on a 2012 or later Hyper-V Server if using VHDx (not so for VHDs) !
Hi,
You're welcome.
If you have any further issues on the computer, please post your question related to Windows and we will be happy to help you.
Thanks Rohit.
