Sample Header Ad - 728x90

Can I speed up Disk Utility First Aid by running “fsck_hfs” with the “-c” option?

1 vote
1 answer
397 views
I ran Disk Utility’s First Aid on a portable hard disk I use for Time Machine, which took around 13 hours (with no repairs being needed). I was wondering whether there’s a way to speed that up. Disk Utility’s output shows that it ran fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk3, and so it doesn’t use the -c option, which according to the command’s man page “can result in better performance”:
-c size Specify the size of the cache used by fsck_hfs internally.
	   Bigger size can result in better performance but can result
	   in deadlock when used with -l option.  Size can be speci-
	   fied as a decimal, octal, or hexadecimal number.  If the
	   number ends with a `k'', m'', or `g'', the number is
	   multiplied by 1024 (1K), 1048576 (1M), or 1073741824 (1G),
	   respectively.
I was wondering whether anyone has experience using the -c option. Does fsck_hfs not use a cache at all when the option is not used, or does it use a default size? How large would I need to set the cache size to see significant, or even just any, performance improvement? I assume this depends on the size of the disk; mine is 1TB with Disk Utility showing it contains around 15.500.000 files.
Asked by Rinzwind (3751 rep)
Jun 19, 2019, 08:11 AM
Last activity: Aug 18, 2020, 07:18 AM