On Tue, Aug 14, 2018 at 08:53:08AM -0400, Jerry Geis wrote: > > Hello - frequently I turn on my external USB 3.0 disk and back. While my > machine is copying and backing up my desktop becomes very sluggish. > > Is there a way to change that ? I am using CentOS 7.5 x86 with a very nice > processor extra cores available and plenty of memory. There is no reason > the "other" cores cannot keep the desktop going. Are you performing the backup as your user during the same login session? Or is it a separate process/separate login that's doing the backup? It's possible that the I/O elevator is balancing your backup session with the I/O of the backup, making any disk activity by your login session an equal priority (i.e. competing for resources). You could always use ionice to make your backup process use idle resources. -- Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>