PCA Forums

Hey Guys, Working on a clients computer and it's miserably slow. It had two virii on it, and 180 some odd spybots all have since been cleaned. He only had 372MB of free space on an 18GB HD. I've burned 8GB of .wav files onto 9 CDs (these files could have been 1/10th of the size if done in MP3 format) and now have 8GB of free space. I'm defragging the HD now with is 80% FRAGGED!! I've never seen one that bad before. But it's taking FOREVER! I suppose that's to be expected, but the HD is different that normal drives.. Do they use a Slim drive at Dell? Or could this be a laptop HD? It's the same WxL as a normal HD but not the same Height.. Any thoughts? eGo

I've never heard of Dell using odd drives in their machines. I know the one Dell that I have came with a Seagate 40GB Barracuda IV that's identical to the two in my wife's machine that I purchased at Fry's.

It's only two IDE connectors high.. lol.. I'm wondering if it's some kind of 1 platter drive or something? I'm in the middle of a defrag now so I don't want to turn it off and pull the drive to take a closer look, but I will when it's done. I need to disconnect and reconnect all the ribbon cables anyways.. eGo

Dell is using slim profile Maxtor drives now. They're crappy drives too I'm afraid - I think Dell bought a large lot of lemons this last year. Dell's on my sh!t list lately and I'm recommending Gateway over Dell now since they've started cutting corners and their tech support sucks so bad now.

I've had 3 clients with Dell's that had drives fail all in the last month. In all cases the systems were under 1 year old and all were the thin profile Maxtor drives.

I would HIGHTLY recommend you download Maxtor's HDD diagnostic and run the extended diagnostic on it.

I had one fail a couple of weeks ago and it was acting like you describe. VERY slow to access the drive, although otherwise it worked fine. Only a very occasional BSOD. When I checked the Event Log I found that every few hours it was logging an error writing to the paging file. I did some tests and I found that while read access times were fine, write access was INCREDIBLY slow.

That's when I ran the Maxtor diagnostic and found the problem.

NOTE: You must RMA the drive through Dell (Maxtor won't). To warn you in advance, Dell requires you to run their 32bit Diagnostic which is a hefty 7Mb download and creates 5 floppy disks you boot with. Select the IDE controller tests and perform the Quick tests on the hard drive. If it passes then run the Exteneded tests.

In my experience their diagnostic is unreliable and they'll also make you jump through hoops so my advice to you is to LIE. Run the Maxtor diagnostic and if it fails then call tech support and tell them you ran the Maxtor diagnostic and got an error code (they won't care but it helps make your case) tell them the Dell diagnostic passed on quick test but locks up consistently on the extended tests. Also tell them that the drive isn't recognized by BIOS half the time and is noisy. Tell them you swapped the IDE cable as well (which you should have done anyway).

Most of the techs won't argue with that. Sometimes you get an a-hole though. Usually that's enough for them to process an RMA. They'll put you on hold for 7 minutes because they need to call another department to process the RMA. As long as the drive is being shipped to the same address the original system was shipped to, it should be no hassle. They'll overnight the drive and won't require a credit card deposit. They'll also send you a pre-paid return shipping label so you can send the old drive back.

You've hit it on the head. I'm running the tests now to see what happens. The Defrag has helped TREMENDOUSLY! I'll keep you guys updated.. eGo