USB Hard Drive Transfer

English Hardware
1

Hey all,

I’ve just recently decided to wipe WHS off my home server and go with OpenSUSE instead. Before I do that, I need to move ~1.8TB of data off from an internal drive to an external USB drive. I decided to do this in a 12.1 live environment because the transfer was making Windows feel like it was about to crash.

I know USB transfers are supposed to be slow. But I’m looking at <1 Mbps (typically around 700, sometimes bouncing up to 1 Mbps), and an estimated time of over twenty days! At this rate, the server’s going to be down for over a month. The USB ports should be USB 2.0 and are listed as such on lspci, and ECHI modules are loaded which presumably means the USB 2.0 is working. Also, in fairness, WHS also looked like it was also planning on taking an impossibly large amount of time to transfer.

It feels like, short of buying another internal hard drive, there’s nothing I can really do about this. But another voice in my head is saying “No, this is going slower than a third world DSL line, and that just can’t be right!” So, I wanted to hear it from you guys, who I can only presume are so much smarter than me :confused: Thanks!

2

Doing that from a live CD might be slower than usual anyway.

Personally I’d consider pulling the HD out of the USB enclosure and connecting it to the mob of the server

3

Yeah, I was thinking that too. It’s one of those MyBooks without any external screws though, and I don’t have any space to mount it, so I’d probably have to do it with the tower case off. Still though, even if I have to open that enclosure with a paint scraper, I imagine I could pull it out and put it back so many times within the time frame of 20 days that it would be clearly worth it. And I guess if the enclosure breaks, I can just buy a new one.