Slow Data Transfer Rate

I am planning on re-installing Windows 7 onto my computer to clean it up a bit. I have a 1.5tb external hard drive plugged into a usb hub, which is plugged into my computer. Whenever I try to copy files to my external hard drive, the transfer rate is extremely slow. When I start, it is about 10mb per second, then over time, it slows down more and more until finally it sits at about 40kb a second, which is extremely slow when copying gbs of data. USB 2.0 is supposed to transfer up to 600mb a second. I know it probably wouldn't be that fast but, I don't expect it to be in the kb range either. Any ideas about why this happens and what I could do to fix it?

True enough, but under light CPU load (only background programs running) I could see 6-8 MB/s of transfer speed from to an external hard disk. This was on a laptop with an old Core2duo processor.

I use Teracopy to do the file transfers - it has a verify mode where it checks the source and destination to make sure the copy went through clean. It also claims to speed up copy by buffering both IO paths - I'm not sure how much that helps, but you may want to take a look at it.

attempt bypassing HUB, check perfmon for drive I/O statistics.

Seeliewight said:

True enough, but under light CPU load (only background programs running) I could see 6-8 MB/s of transfer speed from to an external hard disk. This was on a laptop with an old Core2duo processor.

I use Teracopy to do the file transfers - it has a verify mode where it checks the source and destination to make sure the copy went through clean. It also claims to speed up copy by buffering both IO paths - I'm not sure how much that helps, but you may want to take a look at it.

Yea, I'm using a core 2 duo processor, but I'm sure that the hard drive is rated over 40kb a second too, so I'm not sure why it slows down so much, I could deal with 6mb a second, but not 40kb.

brady said:

attempt bypassing HUB, check perfmon for drive I/O statistics.

This is a good suggestion, and might actually be your problem. Plug in the disk directly into the laptop, and check the speed.