Background:

I've recently been copying old archive CDs to my file server. I am also changing my directory structure at the same time. My work-flow involves:
1. navigate to directory A on CD
2. begin copying selected files to directory B on the server
3. navigate to directory X on CD
4. begin copying selected files to directory Y on the server

Problem:

Optical storage (and possibly other types of drives) has notoriously slow seek-times. This means that when multiple file operations are executed in parallel (as they do in GNOME 2.30), the combined transfer speed is actually significantly lower than if the file operations were performed only one at a time.

In my testing, 2 simultaneous file copy operations from the same DVD-ROM each run at less than 3MB/s. However, the same file copy operations performed by themselves manage over 11MB/s.

Suggested feature enhancement:

I think it would be desirable to either automatically or optionally queue file operations to be performed one at a time instead of in parallel, but only for file operations that involve optical storage (and similarly limited devices).