Weird behavior when copying files

[Met-AL]

I bought a new WD 2TB USB 2.0 external drive and am copying stuff to it off my very full internal disks. One of the disks I am copying from is a very old 300GB Maxtor drive. I have had it for what seems like forever and it's just my scratch drive for various things.

The weird thing is, while I am copying it, periodically, all I/O on my PC stops. The taskmanager keeps ticking along and I can type things like this post fine, but everything stops as far as data input and output. The webpages halt, and the drive copying halts. This goes on for approx 30 seconds to a minute, and then everything takes off like normal again.

Specs:
E8400 at 3.7Ghz
4GB DDR2 800
ASUS P5E-VM HDMI LGA 775 Intel G35 chipset
Windows Vista 64 Ult SP2

The drive in question is a old Maxtor Diamond Max 10 SATA drive. Maxtor 6L300S0
It came out back when SATA first came out, and I think if I remember correctly, it has the old style back where it looked like they just converted PATA models to SATA.

Oh, and while copying, my CPU usage is around 60-70% total on both cores.

This can't be normal is it? Is this drive getting ready to fail?

 

[jay2472000]

I would say since its such an old drive the system is having probs reading from it. And yeah, its probably reaching the end of its life span, I have 2 500 gig drives that are showing signs of slowing down myself, guess its time to put em out to greener pastures.

 

[BK_201]

Backup all the data on that old drive and then proceed to modify it into a hard drive speaker.