Open Radar

 
Summary:

At the moment, there's no way to manage copies and moves smartly :
1) either you make sure you don't start too much copies at once,
2) start from a complete selection and manually unselect files you don't want (which is error-prone, try Cmd-click on an inactive window, and compare against Cmd-click on an active window for a crash course on why I'm filing that bug)
3) or take the risk that your copy will be *much much* longer or slow down your computer by not caring and.

I propose the following :
1) either add basic start/stop controls to the individual transfers in the window so that I can start a slew of them and then start/stop them manually when the times comes.
2) make Finder handle that transparently using some kind of "transfer queues" managed per-drive (a UI setting in the preferences maybe ? detecting the drive bandwidth in the kernel ? whatever fits you) that would ensure than no more than n transfers read/write to the same drive at the same time.


Steps to Reproduce:
1) Find a folder with lots of files (I was merging my movies database, so like 500 * 700Mb files looks nice).
2) Select ten of those randomly, copy somewhere else.
3) Repeat 2) ten times.

Expected Results:
Your OS and you work along hand in hand, making sure there's never too much transfers going on at the same time, and you can safely continue on other things while the copy takes place.

Actual Results:
Watch your OS try to kill you, your hard drives and your USB bus.

Regression:
None known.