The occassional "Drive has not been checked in <n> days, forcing check" message on bootup got annoying sometimes, yeah. It could easily take tens of minutes to finish, exactly when I wanted to use the computer!
(At least this is what my memory is telling me. I could be mistaken, but that's what I remember.)
I always turned this off, and also, cursed myself when I forgot to turn it off.
"check forced", as though the machine is advising me to go look at some daemon named forced.
Forced sounds like a systemd service for Jedi stuff.
These are not the inodes you're fscking for.
I had a largish raid back then, under ext2, may have been a massive 40G.
I recall going to sleep and it still not being done when I woke up. Bleh.
One of several reasons to partition a large volume into smaller ones. At least, back then.