how long would a full scan take with windows defender?

[Xuild]

pc specs are:

ryzen 5 3600

spcc 1TB c drive (going to replace soon because of how unreliable the thing is)

samsung QVO 4TB ssd (extremely new, only had for like 2 months)

RTX 3060 if it even matters

just been wondering how long the scan will take since my computers been acting a bit strange recently and has been pretty slow (which online says is usually malware :D)

[Bad 💀 Motha]

I do them all the time; takes like 5 mins; and my 2TB SSD is nearly full with 60GB free space.

Honestly, most users should never had a need to interact with Defender at all. Except when they should be adding some things to Exclusions, such as /Steam and /SteamLibrary for example to avoid pointless real-time scans there.

The OS will run Quick-Scan every couple days.

And every new file is already scanned in real-time; so why would you need to manually run full scans?

[Xuild]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

I do them all the time; takes like 5 mins; and my 2TB SSD is nearly full with 60GB free space.

you sure you arent doing a quick scan? if not, how the hell are you doing a full scan so quickly?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Because I use all high class NVME SSDs

Except for my 8TB SATA SSD; my 2 NVME are Samsung 990 PRO; 2TB and 4TB

[Xuild]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Because I use all high class NVME SSDs

Except for my 8TB SATA SSD; my 2 NVME are Samsung 990 PRO; 2TB and 4TB

ah, okay, that makes a lot of sense

do you know how long it would take though for a normie with an ssd and sata drive?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Why does it really matter? Just run the scan if needed and find out.

It's like asking how EXACTLY long will it take to go from Power On to jumping into my game if I use THIS specific hardware specs.

No time we give is going to be 100% accurate.

Get rid of HDDs from inside a PC, it slows down everything.

Make use of those by turning them into externals. Yes any SATA drive can be turned into an external very easily via adapter or caddy. Then use those to off-load things like videos, pictures or general file downloads to get that stuff off your SSD to free up precious space you need for other stuff.

[Xuild]

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Why does it really matter? Just run the scan if needed and find out.

It's like asking how EXACTLY long will it take to go from Power On to jumping into my game if I use THIS specific hardware specs.

No time we give is going to be 100% accurate.

Get rid of HDDs from inside a PC, it slows down everything.

Make use of those by turning them into externals. Yes any SATA drive can be turned into an external very easily via adapter or caddy. Then use those to off-load things like videos, pictures or general file downloads to get that stuff off your SSD to free up precious space you need for other stuff.

thankfully i don't use an hdd, running a full scan right now and the estimated time keeps going from 35 hours to 2 hours which isn't a good enough estimate for impatient me

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Those estimates are often way wrong because many apps that do such a thing can get thrown off when it hits a folder with a ton of small files, which is where a slow-down comes into play for a bit. Once it gets pass some tiny files in AppData or Windows folder it should finish up rather quickly.

[Callahan420]

18 minutes and that is just 1 500gb drive a 2 1tb drives. 1 TB drive is mostly empty the other 2 drives are at least 3/4 full. 2 nvme drives 1 ssd.

[Quint]

Just hit scan and forget about it. It's impossible for us to give an exact answer. Hell, it's pretty difficult to even give an approximate answer.

[Xuild]

was about 30 minutes since 4 TB sata drives are slow-ish

[Bad 💀 Motha]

You can even set a manually triggered scans to low priority so that once started you can continue to work and web browser, watch videos, etc without the scan hogging too hefty cpu, ram, disk usage.

But again keep in mind that whenever you download or access files or an app loads up and accesses files, your AV suite should already have been scanning those files without any input from the user anyways.

This is one reason I have suggested people add an exception to your AV suite to avoid real-time scans for areas such as the Steam and SteamLibrary folders. It's needless to have it always scan this when Steam runs or when you load up and running a game.