[closed] Check for and ignore free space during move?

I don't know how prevalent this issue I'm having is, but I figure I should throw it out there anyways.

I'm currently in the process of a 32 hour (yes, 32 HOUR) operation on my 500 GB external HDD, to add a 500 MB partition (FAT32) before the main partition (ext3). Now, the bulk of the time is and has been spent in the "copy xxx sectors using a blocksize of 64 sectors" operation, during "move filesystem to the right". Now, I could understand this, except that the majority of the space on the drive is free space! Only about 40 GB of the partition is used!

Maybe this could be better implemented, to say skip free space during this step? Or perhaps just move the used files over, and cut into the first large chunk of free space (ignoring the rest)? I don't know how feasable this is (I don't know nearly enough about programming in C++ to understand Gparted's code), but I thought I'd suggest it since this makes a lot of work out of what seems like a simple task.