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

You'll have to give us more details. Are you connected via USB,
Firewire, or eSATA? If it's USB, is you computer able to do USB 2.0, or
is it limited to USB 1.1?

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?

"Fast IO disallowed" seems to be a major clue, sure. This comes back
down to whether you're using USB 1.1 or 2.0, from before.

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?

Windows comes with a utility called simply "convert", which you run from
a DOS command-line that will convert FAT to NTFS without destroying
data. However, switching from FAT to NTFS isn't likely to buy you much
extra performance, especially on sequential operations like this. NTFS
is more of an advantage when doing random file accesses.

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

Don't worry, programmers probably wouldn't understand this stuff, it's
hardware. :-)

Yousuf Khan