Dell Studio 17 harddrive performance...poor?

OK, so, a guy I know has a Dell Studio 17 with a seagate 5400 rpm, 320gb drive in it.

This thing is only a week old.

Anyway, he has yet to install anything beyond what came with the laptop and he commented that a antivirus scan took 8+ hours to run.

That seemed incredible to me so I went over and we ran a few benchmarks and the results were frighteningly bad.

Using HDTune, the normal curve one sees of a declining arch is rife with drastic spikes all the way through with minimum of 2.2 MB/sec (seems VERY low), and a maximum of 65 MB/sec (normalish).

Additionally, the CPU usage was 11.9 percent, which seems unusually high.

So, got on line with Dell support and the support person tried to tell me that 2.2 MB/sec as a low and 11.9 percent CPU usage is "normal", though she did concede that 8 hours for a AV scan is "a bit long"

So, anyone with a 5400 RPM drive have any numbers to support her claim, cuz I am very skeptical.

 

Uh, yes.....

 

did you enable advanced performance in the device manager?

and is it running in ACHI mode?

check during boot up

 

Yes, it was running in ACHI and advanced performance was checked.

Dell wanted me to run the Utility Disk and run the harddrive tests available under the extended menu, so I am running those. They said they would call back in about four hours for the results, because the test would take at least 2 hours, maybe three.

Well, here we are four hours later and the tests are about half done.

What tests that are complete are showing PASS, but it is passing very slowly.

Here's some more interesting info--under the SMART (HEALTH) tab of HDTUNE, we see two tests marked with yellow (which under HDTUNE means the drive "parameter almost reached a critical value"

The two values are

a)Spin Retry Count -- with a data of 97 (threshhold is 100)

and

b) UNKNOWN -- with a data of 99 (threshhold of 100)

And yet, the drive keeps passing the Dell diagnostic, as well as the Seagate Tools diagnostic.

Here's some more data--I collected HDTune data from 11 other drives and compared them to this drive

Code:

Drive	min	max	avg	access	burst	cpu usage
1	37.5	76.9	63.4	13.4	117.3	3.6
2	36.7	77.1	63	13.6	93.6	12.8
3	37	75.6	62.3	13.3	136.9	4.6
4	37.8	77.6	63.1	14.1	170.9	6.6
5	37	76.3	61.4	13.5	91.6	6.2
6	38.3	78.6	64.1	13.7	114.2	9.8
7	37.4	75.4	61.9	13.6	165	6.6
8	37.2	75.6	62.1	13.8	117.6	9.1
9	37.6	76.1	62.7	13.4	85.5	14.6
10	37.4	73.6	61.1	13	117.4	8.2
11	29.3	78.5	62.3	13.5	165.1	5.9
						
AVERAGE	36.65	76.48	62.49	13.54	125.01	8
						
This	4.6	70.4	49.3	23.2	62.5	11.9
Drive

I'm kind of doubting the Dell Tech supports claim this drive is operating within expected spec

 

Had the owner do another hdtune for me and email it--it's actually getting worse



Holly crap....33.2 percent CPU usage?!?! I haven't see anything like that since...well, ever.