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USB 2.0 Speed??????

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I am cloning a hard drive using SuperDuper.... It is currently copying the current internal drive to the larger (new) external drive via USB 2.0...

The copy speed is around 5.00 to 5.25 MB per Second.... is that REALLY slow??? Should it be faster??????

At this rate it will take FOREVER... :(

Any help would be appreciated.
 

bobtomay

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Always use the clock to test my speed tests rather than thruput.
With USB you should expect a little over 1 minute per GB transfer speeds.
I think my initial back up with SuperDuper was even slower than that. I remember going to bed and left it to finish un-attended.
 
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It's not just limited to USB 2.0 transfer speed. It can be affected my disk read speed, transfer speed, processor speed, and RAM.
 
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RIDE... this may or may not help you out, but my experience with USB 2.0 has been that:
a. most devices that say they support USB 2.0 don't
b. even those that do are significantly slower than firewire is, despite the fact that on paper, firewire is the slower interface of the two.

If you go into the system profiler and go to USB, you can try to track down your HD enclosure and see what it says under "speed"... that should tell you if it really supports USB2 or not.
 
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My guess is that the limiting factor here is not the USB2.0 interface, but the speed of the device it is interfacing too. I have seen significant differences in transfer speed over the same interface depending on what is attached to it.
 
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RIDE... this may or may not help you out, but my experience with USB 2.0 has been that:
a. most devices that say they support USB 2.0 don't
b. even those that do are significantly slower than firewire is, despite the fact that on paper, firewire is the slower interface of the two.

If you go into the system profiler and go to USB, you can try to track down your HD enclosure and see what it says under "speed"... that should tell you if it really supports USB2 or not.

Anyone know where I can find this info.... Within System Profiler, I see the External... But it just shows Capacity, Available, Writable, File System, BSD Name, and Mount Point. (See below copy/paste)

Volumes:
MacBook HD:
Capacity: 74.21 GB
Available: 35.4 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: Journaled HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s2
Mount Point: /Volumes/MacBook HD
 
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I don't know if this helps or not, but it's the only thing I can think of to do to direct you to where to find the info...

These screencaps are from my MBP. The first one shows the profiler page on one of my external drives, and the second one shows the page on one of my "USB2.0" card readers, which, uh, is obviously not USB2.0.

 

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