Ubuntu 18.04.2 unresponsive on hd activity

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2019 13:05:33 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>On Mon, 25 Feb 2019 11:45:04 +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:
>>hi,
>>Am Sonntag, den 24.02.2019, 21:47 -0600 schrieb nibbli at gmx.de:  
>>> Hello,
>>> When stuff is written to hd, my Ubuntu 18.04.2 gets kind of
>>> unresponsive.
>>> 
>>> To reproduce:
>>> echo /dev/zero > test
>>>     
>>are you sure you dont mean "cat /dev/zero >test" ? 
>>
>>the above would just echo the string "/dev/zero"
>>into the file "test" ;)  
>
>It's even more worse that writing 9 chars (instead of tons of zeros)
>requires "CTRL+C" before any other program could start. Using the
>slowest HDD ever, let alone a SSD, it should be impossible to push
>"CTRL+C" before writing 9 chars finished. If the OP is able to run the
>echo line and to stop it using "CTRL+C" before it finished, something
>is really fishy.

PS: The path could also be important. I tend to write test files
to tmpfs, IOW to RAM instead of a hard disk or a solid-state drive.