Preventing freezes caused by harddisk access

[Manu311]

Hey,

since I'm using linux I've experienced the same issue multiple times. If I do huge copy/move actions (or programs do that) multiple programs are freezing (browsers sometimes, pidgin almost everytime). I assume they are writing or reading from/to the (same) harddisk so they have to wait for the access and therefore freeze until they get that access.
No I see multiple solutions which all don't fit my wish :
1. Buying only SSDs (since I think they could access different points faster and are faster in general)
2. Rewrite all those programs so that they use the disk operations in threads (so they don't freeze)

Now since I can't remember about those issues in windows (long ago, maybe I've forgotten which errors there were, since there were so many ) and I'm pretty sure that could be fixed with better handling of the harddisk/partitions - I've thought there maybe some kernel option I haven't seen yet - or it depends on my partitions (thought I've seen it with ntfs (which causes heavy load in ntfs-3g module) and ext3/4) so I maybe should try using something else then ext (I'm not using ntfs anymore btw - no more windows dual boot makes it possible).
So does that option exist? Is there any other solution? Maybe an alternative to cp/mv? I haven't found them, if they exist - do they?

Manu