Why is it taking days to copy 80gigs from internal to external USBdrive?

I have an internal hard drive hooked up as a slave to a computer and a
USB external connected. I am trying to copy about 80 gigs to the
external from the slaved internal. It has literally been running 10
hours and has copied less than quarter of it based on the progress
bar. It is also claiming it will take another 2 days 23 hours to
complete. It sits on one file for as much as 5 minutes or more before
on to the next one. Is this unusually slow. I've set the the external
to Optimize Performance in Device Manager. Oh and this is being done
on Windows XP and both the internal slave and the external drive are
NTFS partitions. Any ideas why it is taking so long?

Thanks in advance,
Adam

On 23 feb, 17:06, wrote:
I have an internal hard drive hooked up as a slave to a computer and a
USB external connected. I am trying to copy about 80 gigs to the
external from the slaved internal. It has literally been running 10
hours and has copied less than quarter of it based on the progress
bar. It is also claiming it will take another 2 days 23 hours to
complete. It sits on one file for as much as 5 minutes or more before
on to the next one. Is this unusually slow. I've set the the external
to Optimize Performance in Device Manager. Oh and this is being done
on Windows XP and both the internal slave and the external drive are
NTFS partitions. Any ideas why it is taking so long?

Thanks in advance,
Adam

Maybe somehow it accesses the drive via the usb 1 instead of usb 2
protocol.
Have you tried other usb ports?
Have you used a memory stick on that port you're using to check if it
has a fast data transfer rate to confirm its speed is typical for a
usb 2 port?

Also. I have a computer with many internal drives (4 actually) and
somehow if I copy files between one specific drive and any of the
others, it's extremely slow for some mysterious reason. I haven't been
able to figure out what might be the problem exactly, but perhaps you
have a similar problem with the internal drive.
Do you have multiple drives in the computer? In that case you can try
to copy some big files from the internal drive you're trying to copy
from to another internal drive to see if you get decent transfer
speeds and establish the problem is not due to the way the internal
drive is configured or installed somehow.