Copying files to USB Portable Hard Drive stalls system

Anusha · 03 May 2011

Hi guys,

Today a friend of mine came to get some files from my computer and we ran into a bit of a problem.

We were copying some huge files using windows explorer, some were around 10GB in size. Total size of about 90GB. Check system specs please. We were copying from the RAID spindle drives to the USB. Write caching enabled from Intel Rapid Storage driver ver. 10.5.0.1015.

While the copying was going on, the system was getting pauses. Getting unresponsive. I got a Skype call, and the video froze while I could hear the audio. We stopped the copying, and then PC was back to normal. Then we resumed copying and while it was taking a long time, we tried to play Crysis 2. And it was getting pauses of like 5 seconds after every 30 seconds or so. The game is installed on the SSD array. There was no direct intervention between the copying and the game, as far as the drives were concerned.

While the copying was going on, we noticed another thing. The activity LED would not light up continuously. It would light up for about 5 seconds, and then turn off. But the USB drive was busy.

I checked with my portable drive and it was also same.

Then we tried copying from the backup drive as I had the same stuff there too, and again it was the same result.

I googled for this problem, but could not find out a solid answer. Some were saying that the problem was with Windows 7, some were saying it was the Intel AHCI driver, some were saying it is a problem with explorer.

Then I tried Teracopy, same RAID-0 spindle drive array, and it worked perfectly. Not stalls, I could play Crysis 2 with no pauses, and the hard drive activity LED was always blinking as if something is going on. Hmm.....so the problem is with Explorer?

One more thing. I am using that option "Show folder windows in a separate process." just for improved stability. I will see if it does something, but I doubt it.

Is anyone else having this problem?

P.S.
My friend is a Mac guy and I was making fun of him for using a Mac and that he cannot do most of the things we can do in Windows, and now after this, I'm gonna have to keep my mouth shut for a while. I need to find a solution. >_>

**cluberti** · 03 May 2011

Teracopy (and technically robocopy or xcopy) would not use the same exact API call tree to copy a file from one drive to another, so I'd bet if you used xcopy or robocopy they'd work properly. If that is the case, it would sound like either a filesystem filter driver issue, or perhaps an explorer shell extension (perhaps antivirus?) that would be something to look at.

A procmon running while the file copy was going (slowly especially) might yeild clues too. You could always use the keyboard to crash the machine and generate a kernel dump to be completely sure (you'd have to change the default dump type in sysdm.cpl from minidump to kernel, though, before doing so, and reboot).

Anusha · 03 May 2011

I'm using MSE and the CPU usage doesn't exceed 10%.

I didn't get that part about the kernel dump.