[ale] cpu load 8.5 on usb to usb move

[mike at trausch.us (Michael B. Trausch)]

On Fri, 2011-02-25 at 14:25 -0500, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
> I'd really like for someone to explain to me why it is when I attempt
> to 
> move a large directory (31g) from one usb device to another, it
> pushes 
> my load average up so much:
> 
> load average: 8.08, 5.82, 3.25
> 
> Yet the mv process is consuming 11.6% of my cpu. 

The problem is that you have USB that is older than USB 3.0.  Well, at
least, in theory.

USB requires the use of the host CPU in order to move things around.  If
you run top or htop or similar, you'll see that the rest of the CPU is
busy in kernel-land.

	--- Mike