Second in the slow network performance of a backup drive series, yes I cant run unit tests fast enough at the moment, so I am trying to speed my box up and fix all of those things that are broken.

Spotlight.

Who ever said building a search index was cheap. Its not, Spotlight does impact disk performance especially of mounted drives, especially network mounted drives.

Its possible to disable, while running,

mdutil -i off /Volumes/ieb_remote

and then to delete the contents of the index on that drive.

mdutil -E /Volumes/ieb_remote

and to see the status of indexing on the drive

mdutil -s /Volumes/ieb_remote

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/mdutil.1.html