[CentOS] Question on server speed

[Jerry Geis]

There are no errors in dmesg.

Top was showing 88% idle.

If something is blocking somewhere as Stephen suggested - that's a major
bummer.
The keyboard is USB attached and the external SSD disk is USB attached.
The mother board is an X299 UD4 Pro
Anyway to use "nice" command to help with responiveness?   I was just using
"rsync . /media/external" to do the copy.

Thanks,

Jerry