[2.4.8] high load with disk operations

Dear all,

I have noticed that with kernel 2.4.8 my machine gets high load average while perfoming disk operations like copying/moving some files. Usually, my load average is 0.00 or 0.01 :) , but when I start copying ~200 MB from one disk to another, load average goes up to 2.50.

My machine is PIII 664MHz, 128 MB RAM, 256 MB swap.

IDE devices:
hda: WDC WD100AA, ATA DISK drive
hdc: CREATIVECD-RW RW121032E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: Compaq CRD-8402B, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive

Partition table of /dev/hda:
[root@leonid /root]# fdisk -l /dev/hda

Disk /dev/hda: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 1292 cylinders Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

   /dev/hda1             1        33    249448+   5  Extended
   /dev/hda2            34       574   4089960   83  Linux
   /dev/hda3   *       575      1292   5428080   83  Linux
   /dev/hda5             1        33    249417   82  Linux swap

Is there any patch I should try?
TIA

 Best regards,
 Leonid Mamtchenkov
 Red Hat Certified Linux Engineer (RHCE)
 System Administrator
 Francoudi & Stephanou Ltd