I have always wondered why my computer would copy files to an external drive at first at high speed, and then 'hang' for a while before continuing. When I upgrade RAM from 1GB to 2GB I noticed this 'hanging' happened way less. I have now come to a 'conclusion' that RAM is used to store the data and then copy it to the drive, so when I copy something bigger than my RAM, it needs to go in 'batches'. Does this make any sense? Is this what happens? And also, does this mean that if I would add a few GB RAM, that I could most likely copy larger files and have more constant speeds?
I am using Ubuntu Linux.