Comment 256 for bug 131094

An update on my comment above: when doing heavy I/O from an external drive (/dev/sdb) to a slow external flash key (/dev/sda), I can hear my internal hard drive (/dev/sda) thrashing away constantly, even though its light indicates no disk read/write operations. So something in the kernel must be making it constantly seek, and this is affecting /dev/sda access and hence desktop responsiveness.

The desktop is now much faster for applications that are already loaded, but anything that has to access the disk still experiences long wait times.