Transfering files to thumb drive gets stuck at 5 sec

scottgus1 said:

I noticed a possible explanation for the "Stuck at 5 seconds remaining" issue. It's not the filesystem of the USB stick, it's Windows 7's way of copying files. One can watch what happens on the Task manager, Performance tab, Physical memory Usage graph.
A file being copied gets buffered into memory as it gets written to the destination drive. The whole file buffers through the memory. With a large file, one can see the memory usage go up substantially as the file gets buffered into memory during the copy process, then tail off back to normal as the file finishes copying.
The "Time Remaining" progress bar in the File Copy window seems to be tied to the reading of the file at the source, not the writing of the file to the destination. So the progress bar will move across as the file is read into memory and the memory usage goes up. When the whole file has been read, the progress bar will read "5 seconds remaining". But the large amount of memory still being used by the buffered file contents is still waiting to write to the destination, and the progress bar gets "stuck". One can watch the memory usage drop down back to normal in Task Manager, then the progress bar and the copy window will finish.
If the progress bar were tied to the destination write process, it would show accurate times.

I havent checked my ram yet but i can confirm this, was moving over 200gb over back and forth to a usb 3 portable external hard drive, there was none of the problem described by the op. did it in chunks varying from 20-80gb and it never got stuck

as im curious, where did you find the information on how windows copies files lol

Experimentation and googling, mostly. I'm admin on the office server running Windows 7 64bit with 48GB ram & 2 Xeons, hosting Virtualbox and several Windows guest OS's. My backup copies of the virtual drive files for the guests would cause strange slowdowns on the host, surging in the CPU usage while copying the drive files using normal Windows drag-n-drop. The memory usage would skyrocket during the copies. I searched and found that Xcopying the files with the no-buffer switch made the copies complete without extra memory usage and no surges in CPU. The other day I had the 5-seconds-remaining glitch while a large copy to USB was going on and just for kicks put up Task manager. I saw the tell-tale memory usage and the correlation between the usage and the 5-second-stuck progress bar. A few more large-file-copy to USB experiments and I saw the same activity.

FYI, this happened to me, and I let it keep trying for quite a bit of time, and it worked. My guess is it really just can't estimate how much is left. (I have an Alienware laptop.)