Transferring Files at a Snail's Pace

I purchased a new external HD because my old one is about to fail. However, the old one is working fine right now. I have both HD's plugged in to my laptop. I am trying to transfer the music files from one to the other. But the copying gets stuck, and after several minutes, says one of the over 1,000 songs has an error and the copying is stopped. Without choosing a few songs at a time and copying that way, and then removing the file the error message shows, which will take a long time, is there any work around for this?