WD 1TB External Drive Transfer rate

[handaman]

I purchased a 1TB external hard drive from costco last night to use as a backup device.

I started to transfer (using the WD backup tool) about 30GB of pictures from my internal drive to my new drive (connected via FireWire). When i woke up in the morning the transfer was still going on (6 hours later).

Is Firewire that slow?

Any ideas what is going on here?

[Silver Bullet]

Which specific model did you purchase ?

[handaman]

The My Book Home Edition (http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=10306507&whse=BCCA&Ne=4000000&eCat=BCCA|84|1333&N=4008631&Mo=52&No=5&Nr=P_CatalogName:BCCA&cat=1333&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&lang=en-CA&Sp=C&topnav=)

[coolspot]

Seems slow, firewire should be able to transfer 50MB/s (400mbit/s). The drive inside the mybook should be able to sustain anywhere between 30 - 45MB/s.

Could be the backup application - that might be slow.

Or your desktop PC could be slow?

[Silver Bullet]

You should be getting pretty good speed with the firewire (around ~45MB/s) so it should be done pretty quick.

If you're copying from a laptop or an older computer then it could take longer, but not 6hrs.

There could be something wrong with your computer or the drive, you should try copying files to the drive with a different computer to rule out it being the drive (or your computer).

[willy]

Try to use USB 2.0 to test ... if this is faster, the problem maybe is on IEEE1394 side.

[handaman]

I believe the problem is the backup program. I tried to copy the files manually over from my internal to external drive and it worked fine.

Thanks guys for the input.