Frustrated beyond belief! Dell D420 HD Speed.

I rarely post anything that has to do with my 9-5 job because I don’t like to mix the washing, if you know what I mean. This I don’t think is crossing any lines. We use a number of hardware models, some being IBM/Lenovo notebooks and tablets, Dell desktops and some Dell Laptops. One of the Dell machines we use is the D420, a nice little machine that is very lightweight and still large enough to be usable.

That is until you get to anything that requires the use of the hard drive. They have used a 60GB 4200 rpm 1.8″ disk in these systems and it simply kills the performance. When we first received our test units we thought that something was wrong with them. Possibly they didn’t have as much memory as we ordered, causing an exorbitant amount of HD swapping. No beans! It is just the hard drive is that slow.

Let me put it into perspective. We use a Dell Optiplex desktop here that is very fast. Duo Core, 2 GB RAM, the whole bit. Plenty for a corporate desktop. We install our XP over the network with an answer file. Total automation. The build time for this desktop is about 1.5 hours. We use Dell D620 laptops with 1 GB of RAM, another Duo Core machine, also very fast. The build time for that is about 2 hours. The D420, that has the same processor as the D620, more RAM at 1.5GB, takes 4 hours to build. What amazes me is that in the build it is the HD that is the bottleneck and not the network connection.

I wouldn’t use one of these machines if you threw it at me. Well maybe, I could install some server on it, or using it as backup space. But to use it day to day would kill me.