Transferring Files Freezes/Lags! Urgent!

Hey everyone!

I have an Sony Vaio S Series with i7, 8GB RAM and Crucial M4 256GB SSD. Whenever I transfer an large file via USB3.0 to my External Hard Drive, the speed sometimes lags.

Like the transfer speed would be around 100MB/S, but it would stay at that speed for some seconds and the status indicator would not move, just sits there. Then after the few seconds, it would continue transferring at USB3.0 speeds.

I have updated the Intel USB 3.0 eXensible Host Driver and still freezes.

I also tried my USB 2.0 port and the speed freezes and status bar freezes as well.

When the speed is freezing, I see the External Hard Drive indicator light copying but the status indicator is not moving. My laptop also take an long time to load Chrome when this occurs...

Also, something else I noticed.

When I copy an file from External Hard Drive to my SSD, there is no lag/freeze. But the speed is slower.

When I copy an file from SSD to External Hard Drive, the speed goes up to around 200MB/Sec, freeze/lag, then continues and sometimes the speeds drops, and then continue, and then lag/freeze, and then drops. Always around the 5-10 second mark, the status bar freezes and finishes it off.

I tried copying the same 4.86GB file to the External Hard Drive (WD 500GB My Passport and Hitachi 500GB HDD with Enclosure, both USB3.0) to another laptop with USB3.0 and there is no lag/freeze, but the speed is slower...

Is it my SSD that is at fault? Or is it b/c the external hard drive cannot handle the fast speeds? Then why not use slower speeds like my other USB3.0 port on another laptop...

I do not know what else I can do...

Thanks in advance everyone! And Happy New Year!

When I copy an file from External Hard Drive to my SSD, there is no lag/freeze. But the speed is slower.

This is OK, external drive can read the file slower than the SSD as it is using a HDD and they are inherently slower.

When I copy an file from SSD to External Hard Drive, the speed goes up to around 200MB/Sec, freeze/lag, then continues and sometimes the speeds drops, and then continue, and then lag/freeze, and then drops. Always around the 5-10 second mark, the status bar freezes and finishes it off.

the speed it says is not real as it is influenced by caching the transferred thing into RAM. It's normal for it to decrease and reach more realistic levels as it eventually figures that caching is useless for so huge files.

It's not normal to freeze nor to affect performance so much on a i7.

I'd check drivers for both the external drive and the SSD, and in case the issue is still there you can try disabling write caching on that external drive with this tutorial, which is what I do for any external drive anyway.
Won't have any performance hit, you will just see real transfer speeds, and removes the need to use Safely Remove Hardware every time you disconnect it. Maybe the other laptop was set like this as real transfer speeds are around 100 MB/s.