Could well be USB attached. There's some windows setting (or was on XP) about "optimize for quick removal" (vs optimize for performance). The upshot of this was that it flushes the FAT to the drive very often by default on removable drives, which:
a) Slows things down hugely
b) Could result in allocations for files being cut down to actual size part-way through a copy, which means it'd then be likely to fragment when the file copy continued.
I think Hugo may be on the right track here. The fragmented drive is a USB external drive optimized for quick removal. I have changed it to be optimized for performance, and will format it it again and repeat the experiment tonight. I'll also turn off the real-time virus checker to speed up the process. At least, I think it will...
I'll let you know in the morning how it works out.
tanstaafl.
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