[CentOS] Question on server speed

Hi all,

I have a customer server with 32 cores, 128G ram i7960X. So nice box...

Why is it that "all" I am really doing at the moment is copying things to an external SSD disk USB3 connected and the machine "freezes"... Why is that?

clearly plenty of CPU RAM everything... I can see "blocking" to write data to the external disk - but there are 31 other cores and plenty of memory to make it "seem" as nothing is happening right now.

Do I need to 'tweak' something to no see GUI freezes... Waiting on characters to show - even remoted in with SSH experiences the same thing - so its not just X.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Jerry