Samsung 840 Pro 256 & Norton 360 problems

[tydalwave]

Testing my Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb SSD I get the following numbers:

Enabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 377/392 MB/s
Disabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 559/514 MB/s
No affect on Random Read (IOPS) or Random Write (IOPS)

All testing done with Samsung Magician software.

Is there a fix to this? Or should I just expect antivirus protection to limit Read/Write performance to this extent?

 

[techgeek]

That's weird I've never heard of antivirus affect SSD performance. I have a Samsung 840 EVO 500GB and I use AVG Free and I get 540 / 520 approximately.

Just googled your situation and one thing caught my eye. Apparently Norton 360 has a Tune-Up feature and part of that feature is to defrag your hard drives. On a Norton support page it says their storage optimizer will defrag SSD's in Windows 8. I would check that and if it is turn it off.

 

[tydalwave]

Thanks for looking into my issue. I haven't found a way to disable or turn off Norton's "Tune-Up" feature. I have played with different settings in the program itself to no avail. This is really driving me nuts, I guess I wouldn't have really ever noticed but....

As I type this info, continuing to mess around with Norton 360, I found the culprit!

In 'Settings' tab, under 'Antivirus' it seems 'Boot Time Protection' was set to "aggressive". I have changed it to 'Normal' and all is well! Sweet sauce!

 

[tydalwave]

Bleh! Okay, that didn't fix the issue, not it is intermittent it seems. Hair=out

 

[tydalwave]

not = *now it is an intermittent problem* was typing too fast I guess...

 

[techgeek]

Certainly is an odd problem. So you thought that lowering Boot Time Protection to Normal fixed it, but the problem came back? How long did you try with Norton disabled? Maybe it just coincidentally worked right after disabling it. Maybe if you left it off for awhile and tested again a few times, maybe your performance might have dropped again.

There could be something else at play here and it's not Norton.

I hate to get on the Norton bashing boat, but in my experience (albeit I don't have any recent experience) Norton is a bloated system resource hog. I stopped using it after Norton 2004 for that reason. I've read in recent years (last 2-3) that they've gotten better. Anecdotally speaking, once a person has had problems with a particular product, they tend to stay away from it. Also in my experience when a new Norton antivirus came out, it was terribly buggy and they would sort out most of the problems right around the time the next version was coming out.

Again though maybe it's not Norton. If you are comfortable with doing so, disable it for longer and check drive performance periodically while it's disabled (maybe over the course of an hour) and see if your performance remains normal, or if it falls back at some point. It's no fun wasting time troubleshooting what you think is the problem only to find out its something completely different.

 

[Norton Support]

Thanks for looking into my issue. I haven't found a way to disable or turn off Norton's "Tune-Up" feature. I have played with different settings in the program itself to no avail. This is really driving me nuts, I guess I wouldn't have really ever noticed but....

As I type this info, continuing to mess around with Norton 360, I found the culprit!

In 'Settings' tab, under 'Antivirus' it seems 'Boot Time Protection' was set to "aggressive". I have changed it to 'Normal' and all is well! Sweet sauce!

Hello,

Sorry for the trouble. That's odd!

The Boot Time Protection should be set to Normal unless it is really required.

Can you right-click the Norton icon in the system tray and disable one feature at a time and see which one is causing this?

Thanks!

Vineeth
Norton Support

 

[dustinhunt78]

Testing my Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb SSD I get the following numbers:

Enabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 377/392 MB/s
Disabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 559/514 MB/s
No affect on Random Read (IOPS) or Random Write (IOPS)

All testing done with Samsung Magician software.

Is there a fix to this? Or should I just expect antivirus protection to limit Read/Write performance to this extent?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are stuck with the Read/Write performance hindrance. I, too, am running Norton 360 and a Samsung 512GB 840 Pro. While Norton 360 does offer a good amount of protection for your PC, it comes at a price. I have ran Norton products for many, many years, and as far back as I can remember Symantec's "Norton" products have hampered PC performance. I even contacted Symantec about this at one point. I was informed that due to Norton 360 scanning pretty much everything that comes through the internet, you can just expect PC performance to lag. While I do not like it any more than the next guy, I have to say that I will accept lesser performance for the assurance that my PC doesn't become infected with a bug. Perhaps if enough of us petition Symantec to at least do something to lessen the performance loss they will design future programs to be less draining on our computers resources.

 

[Norton Support]

Testing my Samsung 840 Pro 256Gb SSD I get the following numbers:

Enabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 377/392 MB/s
Disabled Norton Antivirus Auto Protect : Sequential Read/Write 559/514 MB/s
No affect on Random Read (IOPS) or Random Write (IOPS)

All testing done with Samsung Magician software.

Is there a fix to this? Or should I just expect antivirus protection to limit Read/Write performance to this extent?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are stuck with the Read/Write performance hindrance. I, too, am running Norton 360 and a Samsung 512GB 840 Pro. While Norton 360 does offer a good amount of protection for your PC, it comes at a price. I have ran Norton products for many, many years, and as far back as I can remember Symantec's "Norton" products have hampered PC performance. I even contacted Symantec about this at one point. I was informed that due to Norton 360 scanning pretty much everything that comes through the internet, you can just expect PC performance to lag. While I do not like it any more than the next guy, I have to say that I will accept lesser performance for the assurance that my PC doesn't become infected with a bug. Perhaps if enough of us petition Symantec to at least do something to lessen the performance loss they will design future programs to be less draining on our computers resources.

Sorry to hear! Can you tell me the version of Norton 360 you have? To find out the version number, open your Norton product, and then click Support > About.

Thanks!

Vineeth
Norton Support