It does make things generally slower.
I'd be more worried about the status of your system - that sort of crash happening when doing large amounts of disk i/o implies that your hard drive is going. I'd recommend at a very minimum taking a backup of everything you care about on the machine.
You might also want to try
checking your disk for errors and bad sectors - if there are bad sectors that can be quarantined you may be able to get more time out of that drive before it finally goes.