Massive Disk Writes On Scan

Serenity09
Serenity09
in General

I have an SSD that's aging faster than it should and I think I've identified part of the culprit to be my tendency to run full system scans every few days. Each system scan writes (temporarily) 4gb of data to my primary disk (the ssd), and probably also to the other disks. Is a particular setting causing it to make these temporary writes or is that the expected behavior? Thanks for any advice

Comments

  • cc-bit
    cc-bit

    Thank you for this awfully interesting question. I'm planning to upgrade my hardware with a SSD soon, so I should be very eager to read the answer to your question.

  • Nesivos
    Nesivos ✭
    I have an SSD that's aging faster than it should and I think I've identified part of the culprit to be my tendency to run full system scans every few days. Each system scan writes (temporarily) 4gb of data to my primary disk (the ssd), and probably also to the other disks. Is a particular setting causing it to make these temporary writes or is that the expected behavior? Thanks for any advice


    No expert on SSD drives but just some general thoughts on antivirus scans in general. Comments below are generic and not specific to BD AV products.


    1. The greater the number of archived files on a disk drive the more read write activity during a scan if the the AV program is scanning archives. Some AV programss allow archives to be excluded from scanning. When scanning archives AV software needs to open the archive and write tempory files to scan them


    2. Some AV apps write extensive detailied logs during a scan. Turning off this feature if available to do so will save on the number of writes and should speed up the scan


    3. The use of a Windows Page File will increase the number of read/writes. Page Files are used by Windows as if they were RAM. Eliminating the Page File which is a Windows option will reduce disk read writes but also may slow your system down. Having more RAM can help here. I think this needs experimenting with on each computer to find the optimal for that specific computer.


    One comment on SSD drives and scanning. SSD drives remain fragmented and there is no benefit to defraging them. However, having said that SSD controllers will optimize their respective SSD drive for performance. Clearly not all controllers are created equal. I would think that if you have a SSD drive with a controller that does not do a very good job at optimizing it this could lead to a more fragented SSD drive with more junk remaining on the SSD drive. Therefore, it is possible that a poorly optimized SSD drive may lead to more read/writes during an AV scan. This is only a guess on my part. I have not read anything stating this.

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