I know I’ve seen guides on increasing the primary partition, so I know it can be done, but I don’t know if there are any caveats to doing so.
The copy speed sounds very slow. I just tested on my system and went to the fs folders (via the C: drive) which I knew was on a WD EVCS drive and copied a 19GB file to my D: drive, which is a 7200rpm Samsung drive. I was averaging 36MB/s using Teracopy.