Scanning the entire external drive before allowing access is simply a plecebo scan, used to placate the uninformed or the paranoid. The On-Access Scanner can handle this nicely without the performance penalty of scanning the entire drive. As long as this is done, scanning the entire external drive is simply redundant without value. Performance issues with the USB interface, coupled with the recent incredible sizes of new USB attached drives can make scanning the entire drive so painfully slow that your users would find the system unusable.Ī better strategy is to scan all files upon Read and Write to the drive. It is very effective at killing performance and making USB drives impractical.
Scanning entire USB (flash) drives 'automatically' is not very effective at stopping malware.
