I created a new partition table on a newly plugged in device and it caused fdisk to hang (even force kill does not work). It also may be a bad drive or some other issue because fdisk -l hangs after the first 2 HDDs (totaly of 8 HDDs on this system):
[1232879.903596] INFO: task fdisk:27176 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
[1232879.903607] Tainted: P&nbs........
This happened while an mdadm array was syncing, all access from writing a new blank file to opening a small .txt file was very slow:
[222117.312078] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[222117.685060] EXT3-fs (md0): using internal journal
[222117.685096] EXT3-fs (md0): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode
[222122.376847] kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds
[222122.602825] EXT3-fs (md2): using internal jour........