This is a very old topic about which I've reported before and has some old entries in redhat/fedora's bugzilla. But the basic problem is that in order for desktops to "automatically" detect that a CD has been added/removed, it has to poll /dev/hdb, but poor little /dev/hda is then interrupted, at least on a Dell 8200 this causes the HD performance to go down by about a factor 2-4. hdparm then reports erratic I/O (5-10 MB/s, where the drive will do a consistent 38 MB/sec in my case in single user mode). In fedora5 and 6 this is now done by hald-addon-storage, which appears in the process table as polling hdb. I suspect it's a Dell 8200 problem (hardware related), though i have an 8600 to play with, and a thinkpad T40 i can try as well. It might also be the settings of the HD, i tried playing with the hdparm options, but nothing will bring it back to a consistent level, other than killing the polling task. As said,this is a very old topic. I'd love to hear any other/more reports on this issue. Eventually i'll file a bugzilla on this of course. - peter
