Info transferring?

[june]

hello all,

how long would it take to tranfer info from a 1tb hard driver to another using a laptop computer?

[chrispy35]

Many hours via USB connection. It takes a few hours for me to backup about ~400G of music/photos to external drives.

[numberoneoppa]

It depends on the method of file transfer, USB being the slowest. Firewire or Gigabit Ethernet would be far superior. Another factor is: how much data are we talking about? Just because your drive is 1TB doesn't mean you're filling the whole thing. Lastly, is this one or a few larges files, or is it many small files? Many transfer protocols give you far faster speeds when it's fewer, larger files; not many, smaller files.

According to my calculations, on USB 2.0, you'd get from 5MB/s to 25MB/s, so if we pick a number, let's say 15MB/s, transferring 1TB of data would take 18 hours. You can compare this to about 5 hours for firewire or gigabit ethernet (on a good day, depending on other factors, too).

:/

[PewterTA]

unfortunately USB to USB will be slow...if the laptop is decent you should get close to 20MB/s or 25MB/s.

If you laptop has an esata connection, if you plug one in with that and the other into USB that's your best bet.

Ideally a computer with two Sata connections you could use would be the quickest.

[june]

thanks all,

approx. 9mins per mkv file :M

[PewterTA]

Yep no fun at all.

But at least that will go quicker than millions and millions of little < 500K files.

Big files transfer more quickly.