And to your point on update stats: they are upto date.
And this is a pretty heavy server, with 12 TB data, spread across 48 Luns, and major big tables partitioned by date. I do have on all the partitinoed tables (and non partitioned as well), dbreindex the last 1 or two partitions, partions created on a weekly basis, running every week. I should say these tables are pretty upto date on statistcs and <10 to 0% fragmenation, might find one off with bad fragmentation or statistics, but usually they are pretty small tables, with much less than 1000 pages. We are making sure this server runs ok this holiday season and getting rid of data older than 7 years, this should get down the size pretty drastically and with in managability.