Avast writes to disk during scanning

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hi everyone!

First of all, thanks to the development team for a great product. It’s lightweight, fast and has a very good detection rate.

I have a minor question about Avast operation, not that relevant to actual scanning, but here goes.

Since I recently installed a new SSD drive, and freshly installed OS and all other software, I wanted to check for excess disk activity in order to reduce disk wear (or at least identify extremely chatty apps), using ProcMon.

I realized that Avast actually does quite a lot of small writes while scanning, to a file in C:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Avast\journal.

Is it possible to find out what is actually happening? Is it safe to create a junction to a Ramdisk for this folder?

Disclaimer: sorry if I sound too paranoid about the disk, I am aware that writing as much as 20GB daily should not impact its lifetime a lot, but I really use the laptop a lot during the day so I want to prevent any unnecessary wear now while it’s still new.

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I’m not sure when the ramdisk is initialized, but I would be worried about creating a junction to a ramdisk, e.g. because the avast! service is initialized quite early, so the writes may go there quite soon during the boot process.
Also, I would expect the small writes to be handled by Windows cache without actually going to the real disk, but that’s just a guess.

You may try to create a string value called JournalFolder in HKLM\SOFTWARE\AVAST Software\Avast - and enter a path to a different drive there.
(Warning: on your own risk; I can see that value in the source code, but I didn’t really verify that it works.)
But again, the target path should exist quite early (certainly before the user logon).

Also, the journal folder is just a helper for the database files directly in C:\ProgramData\AVAST Software\Avast - so there certainly will be some activity there as well.