System unresponsive during HDD activity

[Gilboa Davara]

On Tue, 2010-09-14 at 14:11 -0700, Konstantin Svist wrote:
> For some reason, while running HDD-intensive tasks (e.g. svn update on 
> a large tree), system becomes extremely unresponsive.
> And I don't mean tasks that require any disk access - I'm trying to type 
> inside an ssh session in a terminal, and the remote machine is getting 
> my keystrokes after a pretty long delay.
> 
> Just now, composing this email, thunderbird got stuck at the previous 
> sentence for a second while it was downloading new messages.
> 
> What's going on??
> 

Are you using SATA drive, or IDE?
Assuming the former, does it use native SATA / AHCI or IDE-compatible
mode?

- Gilboa