external hardrive newbie

[sjdoyon]

Just bought my first portable HD.
80gb, smaller than my hand, instructions and support ALL/ONLY  in Japanese. (It's logitec)
So, can I ask a few questions:

It's up and running, seems fine.

But, takes FOREVER to copy things to it. (20 minutes for 700mb file) Is this normal?

Does it compress or alter info I send over there?

I want to use it to hold video I'm importing and working with while editing with iMovie.

Anybody have any comments or experience with this?
I really appreciate any input.
Thanks in advance.

[gussery]

That actually sounds about right for a USB external drive, using USB 1.1, USB 2.0 should be 1/4 of that or better.
 
USB 1.1 was designed at 1.5MB/sec shared.  Which means all devices on that particular port share the 1.5.  The actual throughput is normally about 0.7MB/sec, so the math there works out to about 16.7 minutes to copy the file.

The designers of USB never envisioned high speed USB drives, the design was more on the line of printers, scanners, PDAs, mice, keyboards, etc.  Relatively low throughput items.

You should probably consider the USB drive as more of a backup and archive device than a place to work from, especially for graphics type operations.

If you are working with lots of video then you probably need to consider adding another high speed internal drive.