sata, ata, flash mix - slows system down to a crawl when copying from flash

[David Williamson]

The subject more or less says it all.  My boot drive is SATA, I have a
second drive, ATA, that I keep mounted as backup, and a USB 2.0
flash/smartmedia/etc reader/writer that I use to move pics off my
camera's flash card to the ATA drive.  Eventually I'll go SATA only but
for now I have this mix that I suspect is causing the problem.  

When I mount the flash card, and start copying, I'm okay for about 10-20
megs worth of pics, then the system freezes hard until, I guess, the
files are copied to the ATA drive, and then it "wakes up" again and
copies some more, and freezes again, et cetera.

I suppose this is a DMA issue but I'm not hep enough to know how to fix
it.

Any suggestions?

david williamson