System Slowdown During USB File Transfer

[metaleggman]

Hey all,

 

So I found some old external and internal HDDs and I wanted to back them up to my Desktop's storage space for safe keeping since the drives aren't in the best of health.  Unfortunately, I've noticed a really weird issue.  My system slows down in bursts, especially Chrome, when I'm making transfers from one of those drives (I shucked all the external drives).  I don't remember ever having this issue in the past on previous systems (though they were older intels, if that matters); the only issue would obviously have been that drive access to the two drives involved would be slowed if I tried to initiate some other drive activity.  I'm running a Ryzen 3600 with an Asus x570 Tuf Gaming Plus motherboard.  I'm using the motherboard's onboard USB ports with two Sabrent usb hdd readers (not simultaneously, one I bought specifically for its ide support).  Now, what I'm potentially thinking could be part of the problem is that I'm using a Wi-Fi card, an Asus PCIe Wifi 6 card.  Is it possible there's something funky going on with my PCIe lanes, and so the usb controller and wifi card are conflicting somehow?  Could it be an issue with my BIOS settings?   I've checked the performance graphs on windows, and none of my cpu threads are even close to maxed out, and even chrome is just making a small dent in my 32gb of ram.  Since I'm using a storage space (which can't be used as a boot drive), I'm not sure why Chrome would be attempting to cache to my storage space, as opposed to my nvme boot drive, if that is potentially what's occurring.  It's so bad that I couldn't even watch the latest WAN show, even at 360p, without continuous interruptions.  Could it be that somehow one processor thread is attempting to manage both the storage space AND chrome?

Does anyone have any potential ideas as to what might be causing this issue, and potential troubleshooting steps to confirm them?  Since this isn't something I do all the time, it's not the biggest issue in the world long term, but I do want to make sure there isn't something specifically wrong with my rig's settings.

If any other information might help, let me know.