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My USB drive (1TB Seagate) locks up whenever I copy a large file (>300MB approx).

The computer slowly freezes with not even the mouse working. It seems like an I/O deadlock.

However, it works fine when I slow down the copy process by making the destination a USB-1 drive... but USB-1 is painfully slow, and incremental backups can take hours at USB-1 speed.

Maybe it is my USB-2 controler, but it is hard to find a low-profile PCI USB-card (for a mini-case) which works.

The motherboad is ATA-IDE only, so I can't plug in a 1TB SATA drive.

I've tried NSCopy (by nullSoft), but it crashes. Does anyone know of a method by which I can choose my copy speed?

Thanks.
(XP, P4 1.6 GHz, 768 MB RAM)

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3 Answers 3

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I changed to Teracopy long back and it is quite efficient.
But, I don't think I've seen speed-control on it.
You can still give it a try though.

Ok, there is TotalCopy,

Total Copy is an improved version of Windows' copy-function.
Here are some of the features:

  • Pause / Resuming : At any time you may pause the copy-process, and continue later.
  • Auto-pause on any error : If you run out of disk space, the network goes down or some other error occurs, copying is automatically paused, and you may resume when the error is sorted out.
  • Resuming on power failure : If the computer is turned off during the copy process
    (ex. power-loss or system-crash), Total Copy lets you resume when you restart.
  • Speed limit : Slows down the copy process, and frees resources to other tasks.
  • Faster than Windows : Copies slightly faster than Windows
    (approx. 10% locally, and 1% on network)
  • Small improvements : Shows copy-speed, a percent-bar and KBytes remaining.
  • Does not modify Windows' own copy-function : This program will not alter the existing windows-copy-function.

Looks like exactly what you want.
ps: I've never used it -- can't vouch for it like I do for TeraCopy.
it seems to be all the features of TeraCopy with speed control added in.

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  • Thanks nik. Both apps are good in their own right, as you said, Total Copy handles the speed control nicely. On the other hand, TeraCopy has more options and I like the optional list view of copied files.
    – Peter.O
    Aug 31, 2010 at 16:15
  • The links are dead Sep 4, 2013 at 20:56
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You might try setting the priority of the process to a lower priority. I'm not sure if this will slow down the write speed, but it may slow down the process resource suction :)

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You may also consider FastCopy, besides changing the speed, you can also change the buffer size if you are having many free ram to use. The most important is FasyCopy has been tested is the most fastest copy tools against killcopy, teracopy or another other tools. The drawback is the UI is really ugly. If you are the guy who want best performance and don't care about UI, I highly recommended you to try this out.

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