Windows Vista Copying Files in Vista Performance Question

[Dave Lee]

This question is prompted by two events that I have encountered recently.

The first was when I was trying to back up my email from a (Vista Home
Premium) Dell Laptop (XPS 1530 (NTFS file system) to a USB-2 attached
harddrive (FAT32). I was just trying to do a drag/drop (copy) from a Windows
Mail Store to the (FAT32) USB-2 attached harddrive. The total data size was
around 500MB. After a couple of minutes the data transfer rate dropped from
over 1MB/sec to less than 10% of that and the estimated transfer time ended
up at over 24 hours.

More recently I wanted to make a local copy of my Windows Live Mail Store
(have migrated from Windows Mail) by just doing a drag/drop (copy) to my
desktop. I noticed that this process started with a transfer rate of around
5MB/sec and by the end this had dropped to a couple hundred KB/sec.

I'm curious as to what is happening here. Windows Mail and Live Mail Stores
both have HUGE numbers of folders, but this behavior seemed odd to me. In
particular I would really like to be able to just copy my Mail Store to a
USB-2 attached harddrive.

Any thoughts or info - thanks.

dave