Can there be possible file corruption if I play a movie while copying files?

Question

Curious -- if I'm transferring a large file from one internal drive to another, and while that file is copying (through Windows 7's copy process), I start doing something harddrive intensive (like watching an HD movie off of one of the drives) -- is there a possibility that the Windows copy process could "hiccup" in some way in the transfer process and corrupt the data?

Does Window's copy process have some sort of "protection", or verification that it does natively (like CRC)?

In the meantime, I'm a bit overzealous in that when I'm moving/copying large files, I try to "keep off" any kind of intensive/heavy access of the drives, fearing unseen corruption and/or mis-copies.

I worry about this, as I've heard that browsers can "hiccup" and corrupt data like this in downloads; especially when downloading large files.

Answer 1

No there will be no corruption! Such corruption only would occur, if you have a faulty driver or a hardware issue.
The only problem that may arise, is that the sum of execution time is much higher as if you execute every process in sequence as a single operation, because the switching of the ressources can be very expensive. This is especially true for harddisk intensive operations on one drive.

As a sidemark, if you download content from an instable server, and you do some heavy operations in parallel, which slows down the download, it is clear, that you increase the probability, that the server goes down while you are downloading and your download may be invalid. However this is a question of probability and has nothing to do with the reliability of windows downloads or copy processes

Answer 2

Downloading a file over the network is totally different to copying a file from one internal drive to another internal drive. Internet downloads can be corrupted due to transmission errors if the protocol used for download does not support error correction (most do).

Internal copying will not corrupt the file unless the either disk fails during the operation.