Comment 83 for bug 1208993

Solution #79 solves the issue for me too.

Ubuntu 17.10. I was trying to copy some big files in the order of 50GB to an external hd (formatted NTFS) via USB2 and noted it hung every time (I tried at least a whole afternoon). I installed caja and had the same issue like under nautilus. I have never seen this bug before although I use a lot external disks with big file transfers

Setting /proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes to something like 200000000 (circa 200 MB) solves the problem. The original value in that file was 0. As stated in the thread that value is too small and can cause freezes of the OS. I tried a value of 15 MB too and had freezes.

The only problem now is that the value in dirty_bytes is set to 0 every boot.