Macbook Pro taking ages to copy files to an external drive

[gibbo132]

My Macbook Pros hard drive is completely full an I have finally decided to copy my iPhoto library it to an external drive.
Its about 100Gbs and is currently saying its going to take 2 days to copy!
Why is this? I know the drive is USB 2.0 but it shot;dot tale this long, it has been copying for around 10mins now and is only at 446mbs!

Thanks
Chris

 

[Nielsenius]

My Macbook Pros hard drive is completely full an I have finally decided to copy my iPhoto library it to an external drive.
Its about 100Gbs and is currently saying its going to take 2 days to copy!
Why is this? I know the drive is USB 2.0 but it shot;dot tale this long, it has been copying for around 10mins now and is only at 446mbs!

Thanks
Chris

Don't worry, it's not going to take two days. They say software progress bars are the biggest liars in the world. Apple's progress bars and time to completion start high and get substantially lower as the task moves along. It'll probably take about two hours to copy 100 GB over USB 2.0.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Open Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor and go to the Disk Activity tab and see, what write / read speeds you get.

 

[shootist]

If you can stop the copy without loosing any data do that.

Then Reboot the system then try copying the folder over again.

It should be well into the copy at 10 minutes, much more then 400+ MBs.

Even at 30MBs, which is around the normal speed of USB 2 but actually on the slow side, at 10 minutes you should have 30*60*10 = 1.8GBs.

 

[gibbo132]

Don't worry, it's not going to take two days. They say software progress bars are the biggest liars in the world. Apple's progress bars and time to completion start high and get substantially lower as the task moves along. It'll probably take about two hours to copy 100 GB over USB 2.0.

Yea thanks for the reply, the second after I pressed submit for this post it sped up! Now copied 50GBs with 39mins remaining!