Migration Assistant taking over 20 hours with Thunderbolt cable?!

[Mssavenger]

I bought the new MacBook pro 13 inch with retina display yesterday. And as it hasn't got a disk drive, I wanted to use migration assistant to transfer just my apps, as I have cs5.5 and iWork on my old MacBook Pro (15 inch 2010 edition).
When I started migration assistant over wifi the estimated time went up to like 70+ hours.
I researched online and people said they used a FireWire cable and it took less than an hour so I went to the apple store today and they told me to use a thunderbolt cable which is much better.
I started migration assistant at 12:30 this afternoon and its been going now for about 8 hours and still says 20+ hours and has only downloaded a quarter of the way.
Does anyone know what the problem is? Because I really have to do college work on my laptop and this time is ridiculous.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Firewire is the limiting factor and the number of files. Firewire offers 50 to 75 MB/s read/write speeds, and depending on how much data in GB and in number of files you have, it can take long or Migration Assistant is just hanging (probably a bug with OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion).
Go to Applications / Utilities / Activity Monitor > Disk Activity and see how much data is read and written per second.

 

[anthony11]

I'm guessing that the old machine was booted, not in target disk mode.