Best free antivirus? External USB Drive scanning?

[CavemanMike]

I just installed Avira and was dismayed to find you can't scan external drives. WOW!

I read a review of sophos over at Toms Guide and sophos got low marks.

Any good suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[DeltaMac]

A good suggestion would be to remove Avira, I suppose.
It's unlikely that you would ever get malware from an external drive (unless you don't know where it came from, or who has been touching it )
You would be more likely to get a virus from the external drive itself (the medical disease, not the computer malware)

Try not to start a discussion about the value of antivirus on a Mac.
You will quickly get the responses from those folks that believe that safe browsing is enough to avoid almost all malware - and I would be one of those

 

[CavemanMike]

Just corrected typo in my original post: I was *DISMAYED* that Avira won't scan my 4TB external USB3 drive.

I just installed AVG free (#1 over at download.com).

I just dragged my 4TB WD drive to it. It immediately said 36% scanned, and froze. I'm not home so I can't tell if it's actually scanning the drive, and maybe just not updating the interface?

What review sites do you guys trust for stuff like this?

There's so many fake review sites with fake comparatives, so hard to find names you trust!

 

[Tech198]

This is why i never download from shareware sites. I don't trust any of them. The only thing I DO trust is myself... but download.com is one site i stay clear of anyway... uninstall Avira

If u think u may have malware, i clean install........ i don't trust running any tool to try and fix a problem, regardless of weather it's Microsoft or Apple, Apple may be better for protecting their users, but the best form of advice is 'never get malware in the first place'

What makes u think your external drive in infected ?

 

[CavemanMike]

I have 3 terabytes of data being migrated from a win7 pc. I want to scan it.

BTW, I setup AVG last night and did scan the external drive. It found 22 threats.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

ClamXav
Malwarebytes

 

[maflynn]

I'd say go with Malwarebytes.

 

[aarond12]

Unless the files are executables, you're probably not going to get any viruses from a Windows PC on your Mac. What I might suggest is to install antivirus on a PC and scan the files there. Leave the antivirus off your Mac. Unless you're into VERY risky behavior, you're not going to get a virus on your Mac.

If you really want your Mac to be safe, remove Flash (or use a Flashblocker on your browser) and remove Java. Those two vectors are about the only way Macs can get any sort of malware, other than the aforementioned risky behavior.

 

[Bending Pixels]

Unless you're looking at naughty sites, or going on the dark web, you really don't need an antivirus for macOS. The only thing it really does is slow down your machine and hog resources.