External HDD Problem.....

Just wanted to know if there was anyway that i could get my external hdd to perform faster. The drive is a Maxtor 3200, 300GB external drive. Man!, this thing goes so slow when i'm trying to copy files from my internal hdd to this external one. Even when I hook it up to my other computer which has a 2.0 usb, it is still awfully slow. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

 

what's the rpm of the drive? how slow do you mean? how long does it take to transfer how much data? if you're using it on usb 1.1, it's going to be slow no matter what. but how long does it take on usb 2.0?

 

Thanks for the replies. It is a 7200 RPM drive. When I rip some of my DVDs, sometimes i keep the files on my Internal hdd incase I what to use them later. Now, say i want to copy and paste the files(1 DVD, movie only) to my external, the time remaining(for the file transfer) goes up to about 30-40 minutes just for one DVD(still movie only). The computer that i want to hook it up to does not have a 2.0 usb(only a 1.1). But my older, and slower, computer does. On the older computer it takes even longer than the one that doesn't have 2.0 usb. I was just wandering if there was some setting that i was missing or something that could make it go faster i guess. I hope i haven't confused you guys too much, it's just getting frustrating. Thinking about taking the drive back. Thanks again for your replies

 

on usb 2.0 that could never be right, but it sounds right for 1.1. on your computer that is usb 2.0 enabled, i think there must be some kind of error or something, as it shouldn't take more than several minutes.

if you can't upgrade the drivers on your newer machine, then i would suggest simply getting a usb 2.0 pci card to add a few more ports to your machine. with that, you should be seeing vastly greater transfer speeds.

 

As a test i just copied 1.14GB to a external hdd that runs at 3200-4000rpm and it took under 5mins thru usb 2.0

I would recheck that your ports are indeed USB 2.0 and the case is actually USB 2.0 ??,the quickest way to test the hdd is to install the hdd internally as a slave and retry the copy it should'nt take more than 15mins for 4GB at a guess or attempt the exernal copy on a later comp