External drive Data Transfer

Sorry about the vague thread name.
The thing is, I just bought an external firewire drive, Mercury Elite Pro FW400, 7200RPM, 320GB.
I have an issue, when I conect my ipod, and transfer big files (bigger than about 1GB) from the ipod to the external drive. the computer begins to slow down to a crawl, pretty much rendering it useless while the transfer is occuring. My question is, if its sending the information to the external drive, why is it slowing the OS wich is running on the internal HD? is there something wrong here?
just for reference, the external drive is partitioned into 2, an external boot and a large data partition, the internal HD is not partitioned.
20" Imac Intel Core 2 Duo   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Hello Mr.Durden
It may be because you are performing both at the same time.
What happens if you download the iPod to a file on your desktop, then move the file or content to your External. Of course this will leave you with a file on your desktop to move if saving or trash if not wanted in iMac HD. I think this will help your transfer speed but the total time may be about the same.
Dennis
17" iMac Intel Core Duo 1.5GB Ram   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Maxtor 300GB FireWire 2G Nano

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