Why isn't virus scan on SSD faster?

R

Robert P

Member
Recently got my first SSD - a PNY OPTIMA 240 gig. Formatting it went quick in comparison to an HDD, and of course boot time is quick. I got it as a gaming drive and find I get none of the stuttering that would sometimes show up with an HDD.

However I was surprised to find that virus scanning isn't really much faster than on an HDD. I thought it would be since the mechanical seek time is eliminated.

Any insights as to why this is?

Thanks.
 
In my experience it's a crapload faster on an SSD, but it will still take a decent chunk of time in most cases since you have hundreds of thousands of small files to comb through.

If you have a really low end CPU or skimpy amount of RAM, they may be limiting your signature comparing performance as well.
 
beers said:
In my experience it's a crapload faster on an SSD
Click to expand...
About 156 gigs used on a 240 gig drive, takes about 30 mins. If it's any faster than with the HDD it's only a few percent. Nothing like the speed increase seen in formatting or boot time.
 
Are you doing a full system scan or one of these 'quick scans' that a lot of AVs can do too? Are there any other processes running whilst you do a scan? Which anti-virus product are you using?

For the record I did a scan with Trend the other night - took 2 hours to scan my 250GB Samsung SSD, a 2TB disk and a 3TB disk (roughly 1.8TB of data total). How long is it taking you and how much data are you scanning?

You might want to see how quick your SSD is by running Crystal Disk Mark on it and posting the results back. It might be a case that your SSD is capable of saturing SATA 6Gbps BUT your board, being an older Socket 775 board, is only SATA 3Gbps so therefore the speed of the drive is theoretically halved and will be a bit slower than it would if were operating on 6Gbps. Here's a link to Crystal: http://sourceforge.jp/projects/crys...2/CrystalDiskMark3_0_3b.zip/?use_mirror=jaist
 
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