Backup Method

[dawks]

Im trying to do a weekly backup to a portable harddrive of about 200-400gigs of data (compressed). We've bought a Western Digital WorldBook II (1 TB with gigabit ethernet), but we can only copy to it at 3% (of a gigabit connect in taskmanager) which is 30mbit or just under 4megs/sec. At this speed its going to take ~14 hours. Way to slow. We have an Apple Time Capsule and can copy to its 500gig HD at 8-10% on the same network (11.25megs/sec - ~ 5 hours).

Can anyone suggest a faster solution? A USB drive? are there ones that can handle large files? (~90gigs). We tried a 1tb WD MyBook, but it wouldnt let us write a file larger than 2gigs. And I could not reformat it with NTFS.

How does USB2 (480mbit) perform compared to gigabit ethernet (1000mbit)? I know 480mbit could easily max out a single harddrive itself. Is there any setup that could max out a hardrive?

If anyone knows of a 1tb USB drive that could be reformatted (preferably with HFS+ [OS/X]) so we could plug it into our USB port on our Time Capsule, please let me know.

Thanks!

 

[RebateMonger]

Build your own external SATA drive, with a high-quality metal housing with fan and your own 1TB hard drive. Total cost about $250 (plus a hot-swap SATA controller card if you don't have one). That'll give you the fastest possible THEORETICAL data transfers (with a single drive). You can format it to whatever format you desire, and have backup software for. Then pick some backup software that can do data compression and take advantage of the fast SATA transfer speeds.

A quick test yesterday of ShadowProtect Desktop backup (imaging) software (trial version), with "standard" compression, backed up 100GB to an external 500 GB SATA drive at around 15-20 MegaBytes per second on my desktop PC (with an old 2.2 GHz P4 processor). the backup was 77 GB.