Comment 82 for bug 119730

Not sure who to thank here, but a combination of implementing this suggestion...

"I have had this problem for a while now and just fixed it by adding "noatime,nodiratime" to the mount options in fstab, as suggested at http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148 ."

...and another suggestion which said (roughly)...

'disable the "Performance" HDD option in your BIOS settings and set it to "Bypass"'

...has solved my poor HDD performance woes on my Dell Latitude D610 running Intrepid!

Poor performance was previously measured with VMWare Workstation suspend/resume feature previously taking several minutes to complete (either storing or loading state from a 1GB virtual machine). Now it always takes less than a minute for suspends, and less than 30 seconds for resumes. Hurrah!