Is this typical behavior?

Today, I copied a pile of .mp3 files to a USB3 drive (which was plugged into a USB3 port) from a SSD drive. Before starting, I right-clicked on the USB drive, chose Properties->Tools->Check Now and then reformatted the drive as NTFS. I used two Explore windows, selected the folders with the files, then dragged to the other Explore window. I would typically select ~100 files at a time (typically 5 subfolders) whose total size was 500-1000MB.

The transfer would start quickly, but would then 'stop'. After a half minute or so, it would again copy quickly, but again stop. It seemed to transfer about 10-20 files each time it started.

Obviously, this is rather frustrating as it seems to be taking much longer than it should. Any suggestions for things to try to speed things up? Note that I also tried using robocopy, but that as even slower.

Yeah, I've experienced this sack of crap data transfer in Windows before. Many use Xcopy or I use Teracopy. But sometimes even Teracopy chokes. It's even worse with many (like hundreds) of small files. You'd think you were transferring a few Gigs via FTP FFS!

If no one knows, FTP or File Transfer Protocol can be very, very slow.

Here's a GUI frontend to Robocopy. WinRoboCopy - front end for Windows RoboCopy