Copying multi gigabyte files under Windows 7 to an external medium causes swapping

Question

Why is it that whenever I copy a movie or any other multi gigabyte file to an USB stick my top-notch system (Quadcore, 8 GB Ram) becomes unresponsive due to heavy disk activity?

Answer 1

Give TeraCopy a try:

TeraCopy] is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user a lot of features:

• Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.
• Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.
• Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.
• Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.
• Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.
• Full Unicode support.

Answer 2

It might be a hardware problem. A good thing to try would be to boot from a Linux LiveCD and try to copy the exact same file from the same source to the same destination. If you see the system become unresponsive then you know its a hardware issue, otherwise it's either a problem with one of your drivers, the OS, or another program you have installed. Some virus scanners that do active scanning have the possibility of slowing your system down as they scan every single file being transferred for viruses adding to the I/O overhead. I guess it could also be some kind of caching issue although more information would have to be gathered to diagnose that.