On Mon, Aug 5, 2019 at 2:01 PM Jerry Geis <jerry.geis at gmail.com> wrote: > Anyway to use "nice" command to help with responiveness? I was just using > "rsync . /media/external" to do the copy. > You need to discover where it is blocking before deciding which solution will work. Something like iotop, atop, or other more wide system monitoring util will be more valuable than top/htop at this point since you seem to be sure that's it's not the processor usage that is the issue. nice will only work for scheduling processor use. There is the ionice command that can be used to set I/O priority. It really doesn't sound like you have a problem with process scheduling, so it's is probably more down the line of what you would want to try depending on what a system util tells you.