Using file-properties on large directory (e.g. root of a drive) can effectively DoS it.
On a SATA SSD (not my main drive) I can open nautilus and point it at the root of a 100s of GB folder, then open properties.
It starts counting up all the files.
While it's doing that, other nautilus windows can't browse the same location.
I realise this is kind of tricky, as this sort of IO scheduling should be handled further down the stack - but it seems like nautilus is saturating the IO.
I guess in my idea world there would be some sort of IO scheduler that would know when many things were being asked of one slower device and schedule accordingly.