Comment 1 for bug 362809

Not sure if this will help for ntfs, but I changed my mlocate cronjob to launch updatedb.mlocate with an "idle" io priority. So the last lines of /etc/cron.daily.mlocate look like:

##

# See ionice(1)
if [ -x /usr/bin/ionice ] &&
    /usr/bin/ionice -c3 true 2>/dev/null; then
    IONICE="/usr/bin/ionice -c3"
fi

$IONICE /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate

This should probably be accompanied by a nice 19, to also reduce actual userspace CPU stress.