Do Virus Scanners Slow Down Your System?

File Access Benchmarks

The following benchmarks involve hard drive and file access, which a virus scanner could theoretically affect.

The results are close across the board with our first file access benchmark, the PCMark hard drive test score. It has been our experience that PCMark results have a larger margin of error than what we’d prefer, so we won’t draw any specific conclusions from this close result.

Moving to a real-world benchmark that involves compressing 334 MB of files, our WinRAR test doesn’t expose any obvious weaknesses in file system performance.