There are serious issues writing to slow devices. Their slow =)
ok... i'll just live with it, then. :)
What seems to happen is your entire memory is filled with buffers waiting to be written to the disc, and so you start thrashing at which point everything goes to hell =)
I don't think that that was the case, though...
Do you have more than 2GB RAM installed? Provided that we're talking about 2GB large filesets...
The HD was barely running, and the CPU load was extremely low. If there had been thrashing, the HD would have been freaking out,
No it wouldn't. Buffer cache is not subject to swapping so that HD would remain idle. Buffers fill up memory, page scanner kicks in, but there's not much it can do, it's all dirty blocks to be written out and you can only wait till it actually takes place. A.