How safe is it to run CHKDSK on an SSD?
Solution 1:
Are there any potential issues with reporting "bad sectors" on the drive?
Conceivably chkdsk could report a sector or three as bad and tell the OS to stop using them. That would slightly reduce the available disk space, but it isn't permanent (you can get it back, with effort). I would be surprised to see chkdsk report an SSD sector as bad though. I wouldn't run chkdsk to find bad sectors though.
So, how safe is it to run chkdsk on my SSD drive?
Shouldn't hurt anything. It is a decent idea if there might have been file system corruption. Possible corruption sources:
- Unclean shutdown
- Malicious or benign software that misbehaves.
- Randomly flipped bits from non-ECC protected poor memory.
Solution 2:
I'm not sure if there are any negative implications to running chkdsk on such a drive.
No, there will be no negative implications running chkdsk on an SSD.
Are there any potential issues with reporting "bad sectors" on the drive?
Yes, while it's true that SSDs don't have sectors, when you 'wear out' a part of your SSD, the OS reports/sees it as a "bad sector".
So, how safe is it to run chkdsk on my SSD drive?
Actually, you may really not need to run it at all... Modern SSD drives automatically remap worn bits (wear leveling technology). This doesn't guarantee though that your drive is indestructable, coz it will eventually run out of usable bits when you have a bunch of worn bits...
Solution 3:
While others have focused on hardware part of CHKDSK, I'll a bit write about software part.
While CHKDSK can do a surface scan on a disk which is supposed to find bad sectors, there is other part of the story. It also checks and fixes filesystem problems which may have accumulated. I definitely think that you should run it if windows is reminding you. While new versions of NTFS have various improvements which have reduced need for CHKDSK, there are still cases where it is needed to run CHKDSK.
Solution 4:
As far as I know CHKDSK only checks if it can read from the drive if you ask it to scan for bad sectors. By that definition an SSD will get bad sectors in just two cases:
- The controller has dies -> the whole drive is dead.
- The cell is damaged -> the controller has failed to remap it (all spare space used?)
Note that a cell dying through write cycle exhaustion will go into "read-only mode", meaning data on it can still be read fine until the charge stored dissipates (which is expected to take at least a decade). This would not be a bad sector.
Thus CHKDSK will only warn you about filesystem errors. It does not know or report the health of the underlying drive. For the drive health, you should use a S.M.A.R.T. tool to check the health of the drive.
Solution 5:
I ran check disk on a Revo Drive 120GB and lost 30 GB of space to bad sectors. I would not run check disk on a revodrive SSD. But I can not vouch for others.