back up taking forever

klimvid wrote on 3/10/2007, 8:07 PM

I'm backing up 150GB of video files from one of the hard drives in my computer via USB2 to an empty external 250GB drive (Beyond Micro Mobile Disk). I have been using the computer for nothing else during this transfer yet so far after 54 hours straight only 107GB have been copied (and here I thought it would take 6 hours or so...)

Is this a normal amount of time for this or is there a faster or better way to back up huge gobs of files?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 3/10/2007, 8:50 PM

USB2 can often be slow depending on theCPU cycles. This is one reason why Firewire (has its own bus) or SATA RAID is a better route.
Kill any background processes such as antivirus, etc.
Re-reading your post though...something seriously is up if it's taken 54 hours to transfer 107GB!!
Any chance the devices are USB1?
[never mind RBartlett found it first]

RBartlett wrote on 3/10/2007, 11:52 PM

It sounds like one of these problems maybe afoot:

1. Your computer only has USB1 or USB1.1 interfacing
2. Daisy-chaining has occured through a non-USB2 compliant device
3. The target drive is on it's way out and the onboard controller is maintaining itself more than it is able to get new stuff on the drive.
4. The USBbridge conversion within the unit is faulty
5. There is another high bandwidth device on the USB2 chain that has already reserved too much of the ~480Mbit/sec interface. This is co-ordinated by a reservation protocol that the lower layer drivers on the PC have to adhere to.

klimvid wrote on 3/11/2007, 8:36 AM

Thanks for your responses.

No anti-virus running and no daisy-chains.

I think the problem is operator error. I have the USB2 external drive plugged into a USB1 buss. - Sheepish in Colorado