Problem as follows: 1) Plug in an external USB drive. 2) Mount it anywhere. Doesn't matter how. 3) Copy a few GB of data to the drive from a non-USB disk. 4) Watch the load average "climb" to 5.x, sometimes 10.x or more. Why? This on an otherwise unloaded system. Doesn't matter how many cores, how much RAM, 32/64 bit, etc. Why should copying some files to a USB drive cause load averages to climb so high? (and network monitors to freak out?)