System Requirements and Compatibility

System Minimum Hardware Requirements

  • Recent Intel i3 or comparable dual-core 64-bit processor
  • 4 GB of system memory (RAM)
  • HDD or SSD (PATA/IDE, SATA, NVME, SCSI, USB interfaces are supported)
  • Internet access (for activation and update/upgrade online)
  • 1024×768 display
  • USB Type-A port. USB Type-C is not officially supported, however MetaDefender Drive can boot via an typeA-typeC USB adator

MetaDefender Drive must be activated and deployed with all the engines before it can boot and run on hardware that is at or below our minimum requirements

MetaDefender Drive does not support ARM or RISC-based processor systems yet.

Operating System, File System, and Disk Encryptions Compatibility

Windows® XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11; Windows® Server 2012, 2016, 2019.

  • File Systems: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, exFAT (ReFS support is planned)
  • Encryptions: BitLocker, both User Password and Recovery Key
  • MetaDefender Drive does not yet support hardware-based full disk encryption (known to come as default on some Windows Home laptops)

macOS and Macs: Intel-based Macs from 2006 to 2017

  • File Systems: HFS, HFS+, APFS
  • Encryption: FileVault for APFS

Linux: Debian 5 based (or newer), RHEL 6 based (or newer)

  • File Systems: EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, ReiserFS, JFS, ZFS (encryption support is planned)
  • Encryption: LUKS/LVM2

Supported Archive Files

  • The supported archive formats are the following: Zip, 7z, JAR, RAR, RAR5, TAR, ISO, CAB, ARJ, LHA, LZH, RPM, DEB, LZMA, WIM, DMG, XAR, MSM, SFX, XZ, VDI, VHD, CPIO, HFS, APK, GZ, MSI, TAZ, TGZ, TBZ, BZ2, VIB, AR, ALZ, TSE, TSEC, TSEZ, ACE, PST, OST, OFT, IPA, JMOD, MSIX, APPX, EGG, DLL, PGP (with password only), TBWX, SPF, XPI, VTAR,
  • MetaDefender Drive can also extract self-extracting archives created by both 7zip, WinRAR, PKZIP, IExpress
  • Microsoft Office Documents (e.g., DOCX files) are detected as archive files by default
  • Email/Calendar files (e.g., EML, MSG, ICS) are extracted to scan header, body, attachments
  • Encrypted 7z, Zip, RAR, PDF, MS Word (DOC, DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, DOTM)/Excel (XLS, XLSX, XLSM, XLSB, XLTM)/PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX, PPTM, PPSM, POTX, POTM) can be decrypted by the archive module with a given password.
  • VHD, VMDK, VDI (or virtual disks) are supported but not recommended to scan with MetaDefender Drive USB due to the limit in storage capacity (64GB). To scan virtual disks, we recommend the other approach that is documented here "Boot and scan virtual machines".

Supported Encryptions

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System Requirements and Compatibility