Best FREE AV for a Hybrid HDD

I just installed a Momentus XT 750GB into my G73 and I've been reading up on them as far as Defraging ( AVOID) and how they cache data and all. So I was wondering about how often the AV would be doing scans and thereby countering how the hybrid hdd works most effectively.

I currently have the free version of avast installed, I'm not sure how much effect how avast's [or other av's] monitoring is having or will have over time on the caching.


Does NBR have any opinion on this?

 

AV scans have no effect under any reasonable usage scenario (meaning, unless all you ever do on the computer is virus scans...). And of course, you can still continue to defrag your hard drive. Generally speaking, a hard drive that needs special babying to be usable is useless. A mass storage device is there to be available for use, but never to be thought of, in the same way that you shouldn't have to worry about what to do or not to do to keep your memory chips happy.

 

I would update the antivirus program, boot into safe mode and run a full scan, then once back in "normal" windows turn off any automatic or scheduled scans.

 

An SSHD will use the fast cache memory to launch data/programs most accessed/used.
That's unlikely to be your AV and Avast makes use of a cache/list of known clean files to avoid unnecessary grinding, so no worries.
Also, your drive has (should have) a 5-year warranty and the SLC memory can handle up to a 100.000 writes.
If you want to limit AV scanning, you can disable read actions and limit the AV to only scan write actions but that applies to all storage, not just SSHD's.