Hi guys,
Through twitter i received a tweet about a new whitepaper providing guidance for sizing NTFS volumes. In this article there was a nice passage about the time it takes for checkdisk to check a volume. Here’s the passage:
How long does it take to run CHKDSK?
Another commonly raised question is “how long does it take to complete CHKDSK?”. The team performed multiple CHKDSK runs on the volumes described above and observed the following data:
| Volume size (in TB’s) | Time (sec) | Time (mins) |
| 5 | 384 | 6.4 |
| 10 | 407 | 6.9 |
| 15 | 417 | 7.0 |
This demonstrates that CHKDSK execution time is not significantly affected by size of the volume. CHKDSK execution time is a function of the number of files in the NTFS file system, as demonstrated in another test performed by the team and described in the white paper. The other observation is that CHKDSK execution time for a NTFS file system with 10 million files is measured in minutes (~7 minutes) as opposed to hours or days, which was sometimes the case with older versions of Windows.