Backing up HD takes too long?

[videobread]

I bought a WD Elements 400 gig external HD for backing up my PC about a year ago. It only cost $50 and is a 5400 rpm drive with USB. I just tried it and it took 12 hours to back up 72 gig from my C: drive. I used a WD tool called "Data Life Tools" and simply copied C: to G:

Is something wrong here or what? 12 hours! Is it the 5400 rpm? Is it the USB connection? Is it the copy utility I'm using? 12 hours for 72 gig can't be normal. I'm thinking of just backing up within my machine on the 2nd internal HD or getting a third internal HD just for backup. What is with the 12 hours???????????????

[Poppa_Meth]

Could be everything you mentioned together. I have a 7200rpm Seagate in an AMS Venus enclosure hooked up to a USB 2.1 connection. I can back up my main 36GB of data in less than an hour with Acronis True Image. And it's even doing on the fly compression.

[jagabo]

Is your internal hard drive running in DMA mode? Or maybe your USB port is running in USB1.1 mode. In fact, 12 hours for 72 GB sounds just about right for USB 1.1. If you're using a hub bypass it and plug the drive directly into the computer.

[redwudz]

Make sure it's not using a USB 1.1 connection. That might explain it, though even 1.1 shouldn't be that slow. My other thought is the drive is running in PIO mode, though that seems unusual for a external drive. If so, you would see high CPU usage when trying to copy. A badly fragmented drive can also slow down copies, though probably not that much. One last possibility. Could your anti-malware programs be scanning the files as they are transferred? I've had that happen with a few anti-virus programs. Should be easy to check, though.

72GB in 12 hours? If my math is correct, that's about .16 MB per second. If so, there is definitely a problem.

BTW, I've been using the 'HDD' abbreviation for referencing to a hard drive as 'HD' seems universally used now for High Definition. Just semantics, I know, but less confusing.

[Nelson37]

You may have discovered why it was only $50.00

Take a reasonably large set of sample files and copy to another location on the system drive, using the same software, then using something else.

Copy the test files to the external drive using different software, and the WD software

Compare times.

Could be slow USB port, bad software, fragmented drive, other software running, something else, or a combination of these.

The only way to find out is to break down the process, isolate each seperate component, and test them seperately. 12 hours is way too slow.