I recently bought a Western Digital 1 TB external HD ('My Book'). But
backups seem to be glacially slow.


As part of trying to understand this I ran Process Monitor (ProcMon).
It seems that even quite modest sized files are taking seconds to
copy. During that time the ProcMon output looks like this for scores
or hundreds of lines, all referring to the same file:


PID Operation Path Result
--- --------- -------------------------- -------------------

3224 WriteFile K: SUCCESS

3224 ReadFile C:\Docs\My Videos\MAGIX... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... FAST IO DISALLOWED

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K: SUCCESS

3224 ReadFile C:\Docs\My Videos\MAGIX... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... FAST IO DISALLOWED

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K:\2ndCopyBackups-Weekly... SUCCESS

3224 WriteFile K: SUCCESS

Can anyone tell me if this offers any clue to the cause of the
slowness please?

Or offer any other advice on speeding it up? For example, should I
change the FAT32 file structure to NTFS? If so, presumably there's no
way I can achieve that with the data still in place?

I'm not a programmer so would appreciate a reply that's not
over-technical please.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK