> nice idea - but that didn't help in the past. Why should it help now? > > The question is - why does disk IO make the mouse jerky and delays keyboard > input? That is just idiotic.
It was just an idea, but maybe there's something wrong on the hardware side? Broken cable, hard drive about to die? Have to checked the SMART data of your hard drive lately (error log, relocate sector count). You can also run some tests with smartctl. Or monitor your IO with dstat or iotop. iotop tells you which app causes high io load. Or maybe you kernel is using some generic and slow driver for your ata controller instead of an optimized one? Personally I never had IO problems on linux unless theres was something wrong with either the hardware or the kernel driver. Hope that helps.
