Originally Posted by rwillett

You;re confusing USB speeds with disk speeds. USB might be 480mbps (it isn't really), your disks can't output data at those speeds.

A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, you could have 800mbps Firewire but no disk can work at those speeds.

Oddly enough I'm transferring 69.93GB off a Mac Mini disk to a larger disk via a USB 2.0 connection as we speak.

It has 66GB to go and is estimated to take two hours. Lets assume it does it in two hours, that works out at 550MB per minute which equals 9Mb per second. Which is about right for a 2.5" laptop disk. I could have USB 3.0 but it still wouldn't be quicker.

I have no issues with 9Mb/second, a faster disk would help but for you to get to 1GB in 17 seconds you can't do it off a single disk. Perhaps a disk array with stuff in parallel would help