Is it normal that this should take so long?

[destrekor]

13 GB = 13000MB. 5 minutes = 300 seconds. 3 minutes = 180 seconds.

43-72 MB/sec? Not bad. Probably close the max speed of the 500GB drive. Especially good if the computer was doing other things at the time or if the data was fragmented.

In terms of files copied per second (somewhere between 8 and 14) it's actually pretty good. (File systems add overhead to every transaction, which can be especially painful if you're copying lots of really small files, like source code or something. Although in this case I don't think that was your bottleneck.)

Yup. Transferring a whole bunch of photos or MP3s is often excruciatingly slow compared to what we often expect for file transfer speeds. Small files = much slower than a couple very large files.

I always figured it was also because there is a likelihood of greater fragmentation, with files located all over the source drive, whereas large files are more likely to be found in sequential blocks/sectors. So the transfer speed isn't just simply the raw transfer and transactions, but also reduced by the read speed of the source. And then combine that with the write speed of the source when dealing with multiple small files that are going to be more likely written randomly/non-sequentially, which is always far slower than sequential writes.