What's a fast way to copy a lot of files from an internal hard-drive to external (USB) storage?

Posted by jonathanconway on Super User See other posts from Super User or by jonathanconway
Published on 2009-08-22T08:49:11Z Indexed on 2011/02/14 15:28 UTC
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ubuntu

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hard-drive

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file

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copy

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external

I have a large amount of data - about 500 GB - on the internal hard drive of a desktop PC. This includes music, videos, PDFs... you name it.

I want to copy everything to an external USB hard drive (1.5 tb capacity).

The desktop PC runs Ubuntu. To being with, I simply plugged in and mounted the hard drive and dragged the top-level folder onto the drive.

It's started copying, but it seems to be proceeding very slowly. About 10 minutes later and it's only done about 500 MB. I'm sure this is slower than what I could achieve with less total data.

So I'm wondering if there's a quicker way of doing this.

Would it be better to copy it in portions of 500MB or so, rather than all at once?

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