Long back we had a very tough time on solving the Windows 2003 system volume corruption issue and the main challenge is we cannot predict the time consuming to complete the chkdisk.

One of our main Tier-1 Application was running on Windows 2003 in which we had a corruption issue and in windows 2003 we have to take the disk offline and the data would be unavailable for users until the chkdsk ran to repair the corruption and it depends on the number of files present in the volume and another most painful issue is for a single corruption ,the entire volume and all of its files would still be analyzed offline.

Fortunately Windows 2012 addresses the issue and introduced new model of managing the file system corruption .

Found the below article from the Microsoft TechNet Library which explains the new CHKDSK benefits and its features  .

Benefits ::

• Customers can confidently deploy large volumes. Corruption-related downtime is now proportional to only the number of corruptions on the volume.
• Customers who are using clustered shared volumes do not see any downtime, even for correcting corruption events that would normally require a remount.
• Windows Server 2012 actively monitors the health state of the file system volume, and it always provides the health state to the administrator.
• Customers do not see any downtime for transient corruption events.
• Customers experience significantly fewer corruption events.

Features::

• Improved self-healing: NTFS instantaneously self-heals more issues online without requiring chkdsk to run offline. This reduces the number of times that chkdsk is required to run.

• Online analysis: In the previous model, almost all of the offline time required to run chkdsk was spent scanning and analyzing the drive. In Windows Server 2012, the analysis phase of chkdsk, which was responsible for the majority of the offline time, becomes an online, background task. This allows the volume to remain online and available while the system determines whether there is corruption. There is also added logic in the model that verifies the type of corruption is not transient, preventing unnecessary analysis.

• Corruption correction: When the scan is completed, Windows Server 2012 informs the administrator (by using events and the management consoles), that the volumes need to be repaired and suggests a solution, such as performing a remount or reboot. Because the analysis phase has already completed, no additional scanning or detection is required. Chkdsk directly fixes the identified corruption, and the offline time is minimized to seconds. Therefore, the offline time for a volume is no longer proportional to the number of files on the volume, but rather to the number of corruptions on the volume.

Windows Server 2012 always provides the current health state of the file system volume by using standard events that indicate the current state of the volume. The following figure illustrates how significantly the new chkdsk model changes downtime in the event of corruption.

Reference : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library