Two example cases:
- Example 1: Mount an external unencrypted drive (GPT, ext4) and copy a 8GB file from my computer's SSD (GPT, ext4) -> The whole GUI will become unresponsive. No input devices work.
- Example 2: Start a 40GB VM with Virtualbox -> The whole GUI will become unresponsive. No input devices work.
Using iotop
I can see that these disk read/write operation took up 100% CPU.