Eventually I can provide config. Btw, I'm using udev and kernel preemption.
ata1: dev 0 ATA, max UDMA/133, 240121728 sectors:
ata1: dev 0 configured for UDMA/100
and the same for ata2?
But taking in parallel top with refresh 1s in another window, during the
80
seconds elapsed above, I had two freezes in top session: one of 20sec and
another
of 15 sec: about the half of the time of the total I/O operation!
During this time there was one cpu used at about 30%, no other cpu constraints.
I repeated the operation with similar behaviour. Sometimes also 50 contiguos
secs
of freeze, until I/O operation finished.
The freeze is not about all system itself, but only certian things.
For example I tried also a vmstat session in another window with 3secs of
delay
and it had no problems while top was blocked: