External Hard Drive Speeds

[coastertux]

I have a USB2 external hard drive and it takes much longer to copy files to it than copy files back to my internal hard drive (like 2 hours on, 20 minutes off). Is this normal?

[tuxtpenguin]

While there is a slight difference in read vs write speeds, I haven't noticed anything that far off.

[hodgjy]

It depends on the drive inside, but a general rule of thumb is that drives are usually a little bit slower at writing than reading. Throw that on top of USB not being a constant throughput, it's not out of the question. However, something seems off on your system.

[coastertux]

Since "something seems off" what can I do to fix it?

[abisai]

Check the System Profiler to see if its running at USB2 speed instead of USB1. If its running at USB1 speed plug it into a different USB port. I had to juggle the connections on my Mac Pro due to a similar problem.