USB hard drive churn

English Hardware
1

Slowly working through all the new issues tha have arisen with an 11.2 install.

latest is . . .
I have an external USB hard drive.
When I insert/mount the drive it seems to churn for an awfully long time before is is accessible.
While it is churning my desktop (KDE4) is also frozen.
The churn can take anywhere from 20 seconds to 1 minute.

it is a fat32 USB2.0 Samsung drive.

Is it because of the fat32 format that I see this - could it be improved by changing to a linux specific format?

I have device-automounter installed which automounts during boot so I see the churn toward the end of the desktop boot.
Also, if I hot plug I see the churn.

Also have issues with Ktorrent taking about three to five minutes to load and wonder if it is related to this?
When I open system monitor I can see ktorrent is running (although I cannot see it on the desktop) and cpu states Disk sleep

2

here are the results of fdisk -l if that is helpful


Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40016019456 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4865 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00065042

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         262     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda2   *         263        2126    14972580   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2127        4865    22001017+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.1 GB, 120060444672 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14596 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000affc1

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1       14596   117242338+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)