Yes you can,

It’s not only a great political slogan..

Does Heavy Disk I/O harm your system responsiveness? (Do Firefox and other apps become unresponsive when using I/O on SSD?)

There is a “little” workaround: change your I/O Scheduler!

You can change I/O Scheduler of your kernel on eeepc 900 (and not only, also on: 901, dell mininote and the other netbooks with Solid State Disk) and use someone that will takes you some advantages,

with the option: “elevator” you can try many different schedulers from you kernel:

Completely Fair Queuing (Linux) (Default one)

Anticipatory scheduling

Noop scheduler

Deadline scheduler

Also as you can read by the description of each scheduler, noop seems to be the best I/O Scheduler for Systems placed on SSD,

but I’ve experienced more improvement using Deadline Scheduler.

this is an example showing my current Grub configuration:

title        Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-8-eeepc
uuid        32399df8-340e-45bb-8344-430976ffa718
kernel        /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-8-eeepc root=UUID=32399df8-340e-45bb-8344-430976ffa718 ro elevator=deadline
initrd        /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-8-eeepc
quiet

Please note: what you are experiencing on your system seems to be a bug related to the kernel,

Stay Tuned on: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/131094 to have more updates!

gbyte :-)