ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Hard disk maintenance

I've got a little question for you guys regarding hard disks.
For the sake of saving a bit of time (my virus scanner takes ages to complete a scan), is it possible to do a virus scan and a spyware scan at the same time, or would it muck up your hard drive?.
Considering that both scans require use of the hard-disk.
Probably a stupid question, but I'm just curious as to what would happen if you were scanning your HDD with two different applications?.

Running both scans at the same time would take much longer than running the scans separately; often such scans are limited more by the access time of your hard drive, and not the overall speed of your computer. Since these scans are basically checking your entire hard drive, scan times will probably only get longer as we get nearer to the terrabyte mark in consumer PCs.