Well, a new USB 3.0 drive of sufficient size (256 GB) solved the problem. The entire archive of music, copied in genre increments, took about 8 hours to copy using Tera Copy. For my own peace of mind I'll continue to try to figure out ropbocopy (using a newer 3.0 drive). I hate to be stymied by a computer problem! Thanks for trying to help.
Can I speed up copying large numbers of files?
I'm running Win 11Pro on a Dell Latitude laptop with 64GB of memory and 1TB hard drive. I've been trying to copy my .mp3 files to a 1TB USB drive. There are about 140GB worth of files. I started copying by genre, and the process kept stalling. Even breaking it down further by artist was extremely slow. I tried installing Fast Copy and Tera Copy, and both of those encounter similar problems. I disabled my antivirus program which helped a little, but I'm wondering if there is something I can tweak in Windows to enable faster copying. (I also tried xcopy and robocopy at both the command prompt and Power Shell, and could not get the commands right.)