I installed Fedora 25 onto a usb to have a persistent bootable usb drive. The usb is a small pen drive, and not an external HDD. I have noticed that if I run operations that are IO intensive, then applications can start freezing or not make a lot of progress until the IO intensive operations start clearing up. Doing similar operations on a regular hard drive did not cause this kind of freezing.I thought about it before hand and expected the kernel to handle writes. Thinking about it more, writes are synchronous operations to guarantee that the data makes it to the disk. When I see programs freezing, its because they are waiting for writes.Is there a way to optimize this through settings? Does the firmware on disk drives help manage concurrent writes? If I get a nicer external disk drive, would this problem go away?
Persistent Install On USB: More than one IO Operation Freezes Laptop
live usb;disk