Is it possible to limit hard drive IO per process?
I recently upgraded from a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.8GHz to an i7 2600K @ 4.5GHz. It's a pretty big step from 2 slow cores to 4 fast cores.
Also, I've always used striping with two 7200 RPM SATA II drives in RAID 0 which gives me plenty of opportunity for multitasking.
My issue comes from software which assumes that I have 8 cores all free to attack the hard drive at the same time. Most notably 7zip, Visual Studio during compile and virtual machines. They so completely consume all available IO that I am unable do anything in the background. I'd much rather things take a while than consume all of my resources.