Suggestions for improving transfer rate

I recently bought a USB hard drive, and when i tried to
move over 2 GB of files from my original internal hard
drive to the external drive, it took about 30 minutes!
Any suggestions to improve that transfer speed, besides
the alternatives of getting an IDE hard drive or firewire

Get USB 2.0 turned on. You may only have USB 1.1 if your
computer is more than a year or two old. You can get a USB
2.0 PCI card (you can even get a USB 2.0-Firewire combo
card).

Hope the external drive is USB 2.0.

With USB 2.0 or Firewire a 2 GB transfer should take no more
than 2-3 minutes.


"JW" wrote in message
...
| I recently bought a USB hard drive, and when i tried to
| move over 2 GB of files from my original internal hard
| drive to the external drive, it took about 30 minutes!
| Any suggestions to improve that transfer speed, besides
| the alternatives of getting an IDE hard drive or firewire

JW wrote:
I recently bought a USB hard drive, and when i tried to
move over 2 GB of files from my original internal hard
drive to the external drive, it took about 30 minutes!
Any suggestions to improve that transfer speed, besides
the alternatives of getting an IDE hard drive or firewire

Have you tried using xcopy to move the files? I found that using xcopy
was much faster than explorer for moving files from a fixed hard disk to
an external hard drive for backup.