OpenSUSE Install :: Disabling Preload To Avoid Very Long Startups?

For a number of openSUSE releases now, on a periodic basis (monthly, it seems?) both my laptop and my desktop take forever to start. During this time, the hard disk activity is going berserk. When inspecting this with "iotop", a process called "preload" or "start_preload" is hammering the disk, sometimes up to 10 minutes.

The irony is when you research "preload", you find mostly articles like "drastically speed up your Linux system with preload"- I sometimes think it has to do with running VMs on these machines and maybe it's trying to cache those large disk images? Pure speculation, but I can't seem to find any documentation on this.

Anyway, I did finally find a way to turn this thing off. WARNING: since I do not know exactly what preload does and whether your machine becomes unusable if you turn it off, please only follow these instructions at your own risk. Since preload seems to be a very low-level system/service, I did not want to risk uninstalling it. What I did instead was:

Yast2 - System Services (RunLevel)
Click the Expert Mode radio button
Scroll down to the boot.startpreload entry

[code].....

Since I applied these steps, no long boot times with insane hard disk activity has occurred and I also have not noticed anything else complaining or not working with this service off.