Android 4.0.3 sluggish: nandd process hogging CPU

I have an Allwinner A10 tablet clone. While working the tablet “freezes” regularly but not too frequently for a strech of time between 2 and 15 seconds. Described differently: the tablet is useable but the nice “fluid” workflow is abruptly interrupted once in a while…

Situations:

• e.g. when opening an additional tab in firefox when already having a few open,
• when working with the tablet while downloading a file, these freezes are more frequent
• etc

Using the process overlay option from developer settings I realised that during this time the “nandd” process is consuming CPU almost exclusively. It does not appear to max out the CPU but during this time none of the other processes consume more than minute amounts of CPU time.

Can somebody tell me:

1. whether this is “normal” behaviour
2. whether an update to CyanogenMod 10 is likely to help
3. where issue is likely to lie: with slow nand hardware or poor nand driver implementation.

Many thanks.