Wake up: tons of hard disk activity

When the computer is unattended and goes to sleep to save power, there is an insane disk activity during wake up, combined with tons of freezes, etc.
I am not talking about the deep sleep / hibernation where data gets saved to the disk; I'm talking about leaving the computer unattended 20 minutes and then wasting 2-3 minutes until it's done doing whatever with the disk when I wake it up.
Everything is still in ram, I'm constantly waiting for.. whatever happens.
Any idea what the OS might be doing and, especially, how to improve it, if possible?

After checking more closely, it seems like the system is tied by two services:
- syncdefaultd
- cfprefsd
they go crazy after the wake up and tie up the hard drive and freeze the machine. Any idea what it could be for?

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    systemd-t 1069 root  rtd    DIR                8,3     4096       2 /
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    systemd-t 1069 root  mem    REG                8,3   165436  262497 /usr/lib/ld-2.17.so
    systemd-t 1069 root    0r   CHR                1,3      0t0    6461 /dev/null
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    systemd-t 1069 root    2u  unix 0xffff8801393df1c0      0t0   23160 socket
    systemd-t 1069 root    3u  unix 0xffff8801393dba80      0t0   23161 socket
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