Avast WEBforum
Consumer Products => Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security (legacy Pro Antivirus, Internet Security, Premier) => Topic started by: hctc on March 11, 2008, 07:20:44 AM
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Hello,
I'm looking for a good AV for my Vista 64-bit running on a configuration containing RAID0 and RAID1. Before I install Avast, I want to make sure that it is compatible with RAID. Apparently, a lot of AV programs have problems with this, for reasons I'm not really familiar with. Can anyone confirm that Avast is compatible with RAID, especially RAID0?
Thanks!
-hctc-
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i once installed avast on a raid system (not sure if it was 0 or 1) and i had no problems, but i only used this system a few days, because i had to remove one of the HDD because my brother needed it...
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Hey, no one really running Avast on a machine with RAID? I hate to be a guinea pig and mess up my system if things don't work out well...
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Welcome to the forums, hctc. :)
Sorry but I can not help. I'm sure someone here probably uses RAID so keep checking back.
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Well, I can't imagine how can antivirus interfere with the RAID - every RAID I know appears as a normal hard drive with normal volumes/partitions.
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I can't imagine it either, but imagining is one thing and and a real experience is another thing. What would be helpful to hear is "I run Avast on a machine with RAID 0 and don't have any problems whatsoever." That's an argument you can't beat.
I'm trying to figure out what exactly the issues are. But as an example, Symantec says that none of their home user products (except Ghost) is compatible with RAID. I'm sure they wouldn't admit this if there wasn't a good reason for it.
So, if you guys at ALWIL believe there should be no issue with Avast running on a machine with RAID (esp. RAID 0), why don't you prove it. There's a lot of enthusiasts running RAID and I'm sure they would love to hear about an AV that's safe for their configuration. You could have a good marketing point. So far I haven't seen anyone advertising their AV as being compatible with RAID.
-hctc-
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Very thankfully, avast is not a Symantec product. It's so very much better! :)
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So, if you guys at ALWIL believe there should be no issue with Avast running on a machine with RAID (esp. RAID 0), why don't you prove it.
How do you want to "prove" it?
Einstein (purportedly) said something like: "No number of experiments can ever prove I was right; a single experiment, however, can prove I was wrong."
I'd say this is the case - there's an enormous amount of possible hardware/software configuration and while we believe that there shouldn't be any problem, we cannot test all of them.
So far I haven't seen anyone advertising their AV as being compatible with RAID.
What chocholo was trying to say is that it seems to him similar to advertising avast! to be "compatible with black-colored keyboards".
Those two (avast! and the keyboard color) aren't connected in any way... so claiming them "compatible" is somehow strange.
(On the other hand, chocholo is used mostly to hardware RAIDs. If we're talking about software RAIDs, I can imagine there could be a driver conflict somewhere... as with any other drivers. But - I don't think we are aware of any.)
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Einstein is of course right, but I don't think that kind of rigor is needed or expected here. I'd be satisfied if Avast was tested on several common configurations with RAID without problems. By RAID I mean the typical solution on NVIDIA or Intel-based consumer motherboard chipsets - fake RAID I guess? If the relationship of Avast to RAID is the same as the relationship of Avast to black keyboards, i.e. total indifference, that's a positive thing, because that is apparently not true for some other AV software. Symantec of course doesn't advertise that their products aren't compatible with RAID, they just quietly refund the purchase price to those who happen to figure it out. In light of that, claiming compatibility (or absence of incompatibility for that matter) of Avast with RAID doesn't seem to me to be such a ridiculous idea. How else would everyone concerned about this know that they aren't gonna have the same experience as with Symantec? Figuring it out through this forum is not exactly the easiest thing in the world if you know what I mean...
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I don't imagine that Avast! would have problems with RAID0 when the hard drives appear as a single drive, but does anyone know what happens during a boot time scan? The information that comes with Avast 5 says that the the hard drive is accessed as raw data, before windows installs, and (obviously) without the help of a driver.
If anyone can help with this one, I'd be very grateful, but in the meantime, I don't think I'll risk it!
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I am using avast! 5 on a raid 0 system (since it was released) with no problems related to RAID. Even boot time scan works, no difficulties!
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I don't think the access is done without a driver - because the boot-time scanner itself has to be read from the disk first.
Anyway, if the raw access fails (and I think it's actually raw access to the filesystem, not necessarily to the hard drive itself), the scanner falls back to the usual (Windows) disk access.
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I don't imagine that Avast! would have problems with RAID0 when the hard drives appear as a single drive, but does anyone know what happens during a boot time scan? The information that comes with Avast 5 says that the the hard drive is accessed as raw data, before windows installs, and (obviously) without the help of a driver.
If anyone can help with this one, I'd be very grateful, but in the meantime, I don't think I'll risk it!
I am using an NVIDIA nForce MCP controller, which really isn't true hardware RAID 0, and I have no problems with direct disk access on boot time scans with avast! 5. I imagine if you are using a true hardware-based RAID controller, you are that much LESS likely to have problems.
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using Intel ICHR9 here with two drives in RAID0 no problems for past year. :)
and a screenshot to prove it. :)