Slow transfer?

I'm helping a friend transfer their iPhoto library file (28GB) to an external HDD (1TB). He has a Macbook Air and the file speed is ticking away at about 1Mb/s. The estimated time is now at 21hrs and still climbing.

Is there something else I should do? The external hard drive is a Seagate Free Agent and I believe it's a USB 3.0. I didn't format the drive since he uses it with both a Windows and Mac computer. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Update:

It's now going a lot quicker. Once it got about 15% done the transfer rate increased dramatically. Was it still possibly calculating everything while starting the transfer?

What is the external drive formated in .... FAT32, NTFS or something else ....
Is the system actually writing anything to the external or is it just sitting there ?
If you connect that drive to a windows box and copy files to it, is it also slow ?
What if you copy something else ( not iPhoto ) to the disk .... what is the result of that ?

These are a few of the things I would do to narrow it down as much as possible.

Cheers ... McBie

Hey Todd,

How long has the transfer been running for? And what is the format of the drive if it's not journaled?

Regards,

Ryan

It's filesystem is Windows NT. It's actually about half-way done now. After the first slow 20 minutes it started transferring at a faster rate, it's almost 50% done now.

Like I said in my update, I think it was still trying to calculate everything while starting the initial transfer.

This happened to me before with the Iphoto library and with other big files in general, it usually estimates a big time but then ticks over and the transfer doesn't take anywhere near as long. As long as it's working now I guess that's what has happened.

Todd, Windows NT is not a file system, it is an operating system.
The reason why I ask is .... if the file system is NTFS and you have not installed an NTFS driver ( Which I could not make up from your first post ) then I am puzzled.

Cheers ... McBie