5 hours to Transfer 10,000 Images to an External Hard Drive?

<p>My old external hard drive (500gb) is full so I bought a 1 terr external drive for my mac. I removed the old external hard drive and installed and partitioned the new one. I am using Time Machine to transfer all that data over to the new HD. It now says it will take about 5 hours to transfer 250 GB over. <br>

Does this sound correct?<br>

Am I doing this right?<br>

I guess I will have to leave my computer running all night</p>

<p>Just to add a queck note, I thought I could just drop and drag it all over in a few seconds</p>

<p>Sounds OK to me. External hard drives aren't the fastest, especially if they're USB and not E-SATA.<br>

Takes me about that time to Wi-Fi a session's worth of photos (~200) from my studio laptop to my server.<br>

<Chas><br /></p>

<p>OK, I just hate to spin those drives all night. Feel like I am going to wear them out, lol</p>

<p>Don't worry about them spinning, drives seem to last the longest when they are never powered down. A drive with a MTBF of 50,000 hrs will not likely survive 50,000 power on/off cycles. :(</p>

 

<p>One thing you might be aware of is these drives are starting to come out in USB 3.0 version. The transfer rate is 10 times the USB 2's. There are not many on the market yet.</p>

<p>Dude, if you are going to move that much data around, you need external drives with eSATA, so get an eSATA card for your computer, $30.00 for a laptop card, and some eSATA external hard drives.</p>

<p>stay away from USB..<br>

a minimum is Firewire.. Firewire 800 is better than Firewire 400 .. and like others said eSata...</p>

<p>Sounds about right Jon. It took a little over 5 hours to back up 256 gig from my internal + my Lacie external onto a Seagate FreeAgent. I just let it run while I was at work.</p>

<p>Make sure it is formatted in NTFS. Some drives come formatted in FAT which is MUCH slower.</p>

every 2 weeks i make a copies of my pics folder for backup. it is 180gb and take 4 1/2 -5hrs on usb. it is NTFS.

<p>with Firewire 800 its around 45sec-1min per gig.. 500gig x 1min = 500min / 60min = 6-8hres more or less.. so yes it sound normal.</p>

 

<p>Im using SATA serial ATA Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Drives</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Im using SATA serial ATA Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB Drives</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Yes, but what is the old drive? I would think the speed of the old drive would be a gating factor. No?</p>

<p>Your hdd can come in several flavors of speed; 4200 rpm (not common anymore) or 5400 (very common) and 7200 rpm (yummy fast transfers).</p>

<p>The speed varies how fast it uses up battery power on laptops which is why they're most often 5400 rpm.<br>

External drives are often 5400 since they're probably going to run off a USB port.<br>

Desktops usually are 7200.</p>

<p>There are exceptions, the WD green caviar is 5900? rpm and you can find 10,000 rpm drives but they are rare and pricey.</p>

<p>You're probably running a 5400-5900rpm drive and could save some time if it were 7200.<br>

I'm sure your pix will be fine however.</p>

<p>What Lee said; the pix aren't going to come off the first drive any faster than it can spin, he's right.</p>

<p>If you defrag the old drive first, it will go faster as it does not have to search the drive for pieces of some files. The time it states, is only a Guess, it depends of the size and location of all files. If they are not fragmented, it goes faster. <br>

You might compare it to downloading, it will give you a time for a file. Then depending on how busy the transmitting site it, it can vary from much less time, to even more than the time stated. I'd set it up, then just go watch the Olympics or go to bed and let it happen. :D</p>

<p>With Time Machine, only the first transfer take long. After that, it only transfers new data. Five hours sounds reasonable.</p>

<p>There is overhead associated with the large quantity of files. There is some handshaking and verification going on with each file transfered.<br>

<br /> A large transfer in megabytes/gigabytes may give feedback like it is going faster when it gets/goes to a large file; then slower as a mess of dinky ones are passing.<br>

<br /> Thus after 1 hour the display may say it only has 2 hours left since it is currently passing a giant file.<br>

Then maybe after 2 hours it may say it has 6 hours to go since it is bogging on a bunch of dinky files right then.<br>

<br /> If one is currently using ones computer the transfer can slow down too.<br>

<br /> A highly fragmented source or target disc drive can bog the transfer too.<br>

<br /> With some macs the USB jack on the keyboard is only usb 1.1; and the back USB jack is usb 2.0.<br>

<br /> A "full" HDA can have its last files added stuck/placed all over the place; on different platters/heads/sectors.<br>

It is like instead of having the box wrenches all in one box on the garage workbench; that they are all scattered all over the house.<br>

Imagine if the 1/2 wrench is in the attic;<br>

the 3/8 wrench is in the Cherrios box;<br>

the 7/16" wrench is inside the washing machine;<br>

the 9/16" wrench on the roof; the 5/8" wrench is in your bed;<br>

he 11/16 " wrench is with the green bean cans in the pantry;<br>

the 3/4" wrench is in the dining room with Grandmoms silverware.<br>

Defraging attempts to place all the inch wrenches in one area; or only a few places if there is no more space. Like house cleaning; one throws first out the junk; then one strives to but like stuff together.</p>

<p>Most USB drives are formatted to FAT32 off the shelf, on a PC I always reformat them to NTFS. Not sure whether Mac,s support NTFS.</p>

<p>I think your transfer rate is slow. One thing to watch out for is Anti Virus software. I use AVG free, and if I don't turn off the resident shield feature then file transfers are incredibly slow as it virus checks each file.</p>

<p>MACS defrag automatically there is no need to do anything.......I would check the speed of the USB port you are using.</p>

<p>Marc; the OP stated is drive was about full. Defrag cannot work well with a full house; it often does not move alot of stuff when the HDA is full; since there is no "elbow room" to work with. A full Mac; PC or persons own house means a full defrag is not possible. Trying transfer files ou of a full hda; or moving stuff out of a about completely full house can tend to take more time.</p>

<p>Good evening Photo.net community.</p>

<p>I am about to contact Western Digital but I decided to check Photo.net first, and I ran into this tread, so I have one question to add that is about the same as this posting.</p>

<p>I just bought a new PC and added a 1TBite internal HDD for my data, photos, only. I have 2 - 1TBite Western Digital MyBook external HDD's attached to my old system as a main and backup HDD. I am now transferring the data (300GBite total) to my new PC's HDD.</p>

<p>The MyBook is attached with firewire, I think the 400 type (?). I am currently transferring a set of files of 164 GBite and that shows 21 hours estimated time. That was a few hours ago and it still shows 21 hours left to go, but it is transferring at a speed of 1.15MBite per second. I can verify it is working by looking at the new files added on the new HDD.</p>

<p>Once my new system is running I will use both MyBook's as a dual back-up system attached to the new PC, and work the photos of my internal HDD.</p>

<p>Now I am thinking by reading the post's here that my situation has to be extremely slow, and there has to be a better way. It will probably take me a week or two to get the whole 300GBite transfered.</p>

<p>Any ideas? I am going to contact Western Digital to see what they say as well. Right now I don't have much choice, but if I have to do this in the future in an emergency situation then I would like a much faster speed.</p>

<p>BTW, the new PC is a HP pavilion P6310Y Athlon II Quad Core Processor, with 6GBite memory, Windows 7, and 2 times 1 TBite HDD.</p>

<p>Just one more note, I am using the internal HDD on my old PC to work with, not the MyBook. The MYBook is just a storage system, but with the main MYBook I mean that I manually transfer the files to it and the back-up MyBook automatically copy the main so to speak. I hope it's not to confusing.</p>

<p>The old computers internal HDD is only small (360GBite) and will not hold but a few clients photos, thats why after the client ordered the photos, the files are removed from this little one, and burned on a cd as well.</p>