ICH7 IO Performance Issues

[Steve Clement]

Hi list,

I recently bought a New Asus W5F - 12" Laptop and am experiencing some 
issues
with:

If "Heavy" disk access occurs I experience overall system hangs

Say I just compiled OpenOffice.Org and am happy all is fine so I can do 
a make
clean.

Make clean generates quite a lot of disk IO and everything begins lagging
like: ls or playing an MP3 file.

So I tried to reproduce this by doing the following:

cat /dev/random > /tmp/junk_file
didn't have the same effect, but I think that's because the source was 
not the
local disk but fast memory
a cp of a big file (1GB) didn't do anything
BUT an rsync of that very same big file did give me hangs in my music at 
least
so I catted big file attached it to now even bigger file and had some 
trouble
too. The more I spawned IO Processes the badder it got.

Is that a known issue? With 1.5Gb Ram there is for sure no way I ran out of
Ram or any other memory issue (3Gig Swap)

Also whilst rsyncing locally from disc to disc I noticed only between 
10MB/s -
15MB/s throughput on average it did spike on 24MB during a few seconds.

I seem to notice this issue quite often on FreeBSD, I had major RAID 
performance problems with a Rocket Raid adapter (ok I know it ain't the 
best but for what it's worth it should be more or less stable)

Are there disk I/O issues on a larger scale maybe?

Sincerely yours and willing to test/help,

Steve Clement