It may appear to be an Xorg or lightdm/gdm/mdm error but in reality for many users with this issue, it's a driver conflict and issue. I had a system that had two GPUs, an Intel and Nvidia GPU.
The only thing that got it working was to remove the nouveau driver and blacklist it so it never came back, then the Intel GPU works fine without these issues.
Solution
sudo rmmod nouveau
add nouveau/other driver to blacklist
edit th........
This is a 8TB Seagate external USB 3.0 device apparently newer kernels use a module called "UAS" instead of "USB Storage" which causes issues as a lot of devices are not properly supported in UAS mode by the kernel driver. The solution some say is to disable UAS specifically for your USB device but I'd rather just disable UAS altogether.
Solution blacklist UAS: *do not do this it does not work and just causes your USB 3.0........
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........