Scanning Speed and quality of AV or IS?

I am sure many of you has been using different types/ kinds of Antivirus softwares or Internet Security softwares to protect your system.

Whether it is a paid software, free software or doing testing of any.
My objective of this is, will the scanning speed of those software determine the quality of the security products?

Like is it mean scanning very slow (during virus scan), which means it is scanning very thoroughly or comprehensively. Scanning fast may not be very thoroughly or so. (Lets say it is not a quick scan, flash scan.)

What's your opinion on this? Will you choose a scanning speed faster of security software or you think scanning speed slow is good?

 

Better judge them by running a full scan and measure the scanning speed. As far as I know Avira has the fastest scan time.

 

The thorough product may still can faster, if a scan has been done before and it only scans new or modified files, whereas the superficial product may scan everything again. Without talking about specific products you cannot really say.

 

From several decades of security software testing I have found that the scanning speed of a product does not necessarily correlate to the quality of said product. Different products just have different scanning algorithms which doesn't always mean that they are better than another product but just different in their approach to the task at hand.

 

Agreed.

 

Understood.

 

It's also a matter of how AV performs a scan and what kind of optimizations it uses to speed up the scanning. Pretty much all of them perform caching, some even permanent caching which then permanently speeds up future scans.

 

Check out the correlations at https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=2328932&postcount=14. The top 5 overall also got three stars in the latest performance test.

 

Frankly, I don't know what good is scanning your local drives. Scan on access is the only thing you need. If you have some malware residing on your disk that will be caught the first time you will try to access it. So, Scan on Demand looks to me more like a marketing bs... "what good is a software that doesn't offer me a button to press?"

Scan On Access means that you don't even wonder about speed...

But if you still want to press that button, I think that speed doesn't have anything to do with quality. If the scan is properly coded, can be Very Good and Very Fast. Consider that a lot of companies have legacy code in their products and cannot just refactor every year the entire code just to work faster... they have to do it in a such way so the selling process won't be disturbed.

 

For users that multiboot OSes on the same machine the best way to scan for a virus is from outside the OS.
Then there is little to no chance that the malware is being disguised by a rootkit.

Thus on access will not be effective if i am not using the OS.
This is where a custom scan comes in.