Slow copying over Firewire 800 in OS X Lion

[Negator]

I am trying to make a backup (file copy) of about 150,000 photos (862 GB). I am copying over Firewire 800 to a WD My Book 2. The estimated time is showing 7+ days. After 6 hours, there was about 32 GB copied.

This seems extremely slow.

Recently my Time Machine backup was corrupted so I used a new drive and it took over a week to do the initial backup over Firewire.

I don't remember my initial backups taking that long on this iMac the few times I have had to swicth to a new drive.

I'm not sure how best to troubleshoot this - but I have seen some grumblings about the newest update to Time Machine causing very slow backups. With the straight file-copy experience I am having now, I'm wondering if it is the firewire driver.

Has anyone had any similar issues and have you been able to successfully fix them?

I'm using a 2010 27" iMac w/2.93 Core i7, 8GB RAM, 2TB drive.

 

[Negator]

I tried the same drive using the USB connection. It showed 2 hours initially upon a copy of 32GB. However, when I came back about 4 hours later, the time estimate had jumped to 17 hours and not even 1 GB had copied in that time.

I suspect the drive interface must but bad, so I will test a new drive tomorrow.

If that's not it, then I guess its got to be an issue with the iMac.