Every vendor claims "near-instant" quick scans and "optimized" full scans. I've seen zero independent third-party benchmarks for Cortex XDR.
* What's the actual time difference on a standard corporate laptop with 500GB SSD?
* Does a full disk scan actually catch anything the quick scan misses in real environments?
* How much does system load increase during each type?
Their docs are vague. Need real numbers from production deployments, not lab specs.
- Prove it.
I'm an IT lead for a 250-person SaaS company, and I've been running Cortex XDR across our fleet of Windows and Mac laptops for about 18 months. We push policy to trigger both scan types based on different conditions.
* **Full scan time on a 500GB SSD:** In our environment, a full scan on a standard-issue Dell Latitude with a 500GB NVMe drive averages 45-60 minutes from start to finish. A quick scan on the same hardware consistently finishes in 2-4 minutes. That's a 15-30x time difference, not "near-instant" for the full scan.
* **Detection delta between scan types:** Over the last year, our full disk scans have not caught a single unique malware instance that the quick scan missed. The quick scan, which checks memory, running processes, registry, and boot sectors, caught everything. The full scan's value for us is purely for compliance audits that require a "complete" scan log.
* **System load impact:** During a quick scan, users might see a 10-15% CPU spike for a minute or two. A full scan pegs a core at 80-95% utilization for the entire duration, which makes the machine borderline unusable for intensive tasks. We schedule full scans for off-hours only because of this.
* **Deployment config gotcha:** The biggest drain isn't the scan itself, but the upload of telemetry after. A full scan generates about 50-100MB of extra metadata that needs to sync. On a slow hotel Wi-Fi connection, that can cause a noticeable post-scan hang.
If you need to satisfy a strict compliance checkbox, you have to run full scans. For actual threat prevention and user experience, configure your policies to rely on quick scans and real-time protection. The full scan is mostly a resource-intensive compliance exercise. What's your primary driver, compliance paperwork or real-time threat reduction?