Any way to copy lots of small files faster?

[Spanky Deluxe]

I need to move a lot of simulation data from one of my internal hard drives to an external one. It's only about 750GB but is made up of a lot of smallish files (about 800,000). Using the standard drag and drop copy it's saying it's going to take 24 hours.

Any thoughts on a quicker method? I've seen it mentioned online that tarring it all up and untarring it on the other drive might be faster but I'm lacking on space on the drive where the files are (maybe tarring straight to the external drive would work and then untar it there?)

 

[RaceTripper]

I would look into using rsync (bring up Terminal and type: man rsync).

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

I'll give rsync a shot - it'd be more restartable anyway although I won't have a time estimate but the calculator and a get info on the drive should be able to give me that.

 

[talmy]

For what it's worth, that 8MB/sec, which isn't really that much off from what I'd expect for 1 Megabyte files. I see about 3x that for just reading small files like that from a FW800 7200 RPM drive. Since you are reading and writing (albeit the reads are internal) it would be a bit slower, and slower still if the external is USB or either drive is slow.