For those who care (and anyone who happens to be googling for an
answer to a similar problem), I found out what was wrong with my USB
hard drive.  It was...(drum roll please)...

supermount!

Unmounting the drive, and remounting it by hand (and telling the
OS it was ext3, rather than "vfat:ext2"), bumped the transfer rate and
stopped the constant remounting.  Why?  THAT I don't know.

Cheers to all

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