Fedora 19 - filesystems slow

[George R Goffe]

Hi,

I have a Fedora 19 system with several large 2-4TB drives attached via USB-SATA docking stations.

I'm seeing a problem whereby a specific filesystem that hasn't been accessed for some time and is REALLY slow to respond to initial requests. ls -alt for example takes a substantial bit of time to respond at first but then response is acceptable after that.

I'm trying to figure out what's happening and why and what I can do about it. It's like the buffers are empty and they need to be filled. Are there kernel tunable parameters that can be changed to avoid this problem?

Thanks,

George...