Processor usage with USB thumb drives

[dino8031]

When I transfer data, either read or write to my USB thumb drives my processor usage jumps up to 100%. Is this normal and is there a way to reduce processor usage during transfers?

 

[Jeff7]

What processor speed, motherboard, OS?

I've got NF7-S motherboards, Athlon XP procs around 2GHz, and WinXP SP1 and SP2 (two separate systems). AIDA32's read tests gave an average of 50% utilization on a quick linear read, but 3% on a buffered read; 27% on the access speed test.

For copying a file, CPU utilization stays around 7%, but jumps to 60% when the write was finished. Deleting a file also created a little leap in CPU utilization.