I've noticed one thing with avast! v8 (which i didn't with avast! v7), whenever i put a game disc (DVD) into my optical unit it's thrashing it around like crazy and its taking ages for anything to start or even show up as files in an opened folder. And last time i had such experience was some audio encoder trying to rip 8 tracks from an Audio CD at once, making slow optical head in optical drives move around and try to seek each track on different place of the drive. It was slow, noisy and it sounded like it will break apart any second. As soon as i disabled multithreading (which otherwise works great with HDD), read speed went sky high, no thrashing around and noises and even though it was doing only 1 track at a time it was fast. Because optical drives are designed to work that way.
To me it seems like avast! 8 is trying to read (and scan) several files at once from DVD, resulting in MUCH slower performance than if it would scan file after file in sequence, pretty much as the recorded spiral goes around (menaing you have no random seeking). Optical drives were never designed for loads of sequential random reads all over the optical disc surface.
I'm not sure whats going on but to me it seems like avast! v8 is scanning several files at once from HDD. However no one predicted that avast! will continue to do the same with optical drives as well and that thrashes it into bits pretty much. I've started playing a lot of yet unplayed games that i've bought in the past and this is really ridiculous. Placed Alice Madness Returns in the drive and it was just thrashing itself for 10 minutes and it failed to list files in one folder on the DVD. So i ejected the DVD as it was driving me nuts. Disabling avast! entirely, insert the DVD and all is fine again. Files are quite quickly listed in all folders, everything works fine.
Win7 64bit fully updated
avast! Free 8.0.1483
