Tuesday, June 18, 2013

DiskFresh Installation and Setup

DiskFresh is a useful utility to ensure that your hard drive is storing your data accurately, and that the magnetic signal on the drive is not "fading away" or suffering from "bit rot". Download the free setup file from www.puransoftware.com
Installation is pretty straightforward, as you can see from the steps above. You follow through the screens, agree to the software license, and allow it to install the program in your Program Files folder. By the time you are completed, you should see the normal DiskFresh user interface
(click on the image for actual size)
As you can see, all the drive letters (except network mapped drives) are shown here, as well as the physical drive. In this case it is drive 0, which has two partitions, C: and D:. The other drive letters are TrueCrypt volumes, and can be ignored.
Now Let's take a look at the Task Scheduler (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools) and see how the scheduled task has been set up.
Double-click (or select Properties) to see the task details
Click "Edit" to see the details of when the trigger takes place:
In this case I am going to change it to run every 13th Saturday, i.e. 4 times per year.
Click "Edit" to see the program to be run:
I have added the parameters "/RW" for Read and Write, and "0:" (zero colon) for Physical Drive Zero. This will allow the program to start its work unattended.
Update 4 July 2013: DiskFresh is now at version 1.1, which fixes a bug encountered when using encryption in some cases.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

This is a great concept. It probably should be included in the Windows OS and set to default to do a quarterly job. The down side is that it appears a 1TB drive will take roughly 3 days. I haven't tried it yet but I'm about to.

Donn Edwards said...

My backup/storage PC has two 6TB drives and one 2TB drive. I started the last refresh on Saturday, 04 April 2020, 06:30:01, and it ended on Wednesday, 08 April 2020, 13:27:30. That's about 7.3 hours per TB, including interruptions for normal usage.

Obviously it depends on the speed and condition of the drive(s).