External hard drive slower than Christmas (1 Viewer)

I back up all of my music to an external drive. My computer is an Acer running Win 7 that's not too old (about 2 years old). I previously had a WD external drive and it took forever even to copy one album over. I made the assumption it was the external HD and switched out to a Toshiba external HD. Same stinkin' problem. I bought a bunch of CD's today at a thrift store and I'm copying them to the computer. They rip super fast to the regular hard drive but it's taking on average 10-15 minutes to copy over to the external HD. Any thoughts?

PS: I save nothing as mp3 files unless I download it as an mp3. Everything is saved as a wav file.

Ron - .wav files are much larger than .mp3. Also, the internal bus on your Acer is going to be much faster than the USB bus. Am I correct in guessing the external drive is USB2? If you have a USB3 port on your computer (internally, it will usually be blue instead of white or black) you can use a USB3 drive which will speed things up considerably.

A CD is 660 MB. A USB2 drive should transfer data around 30MB/s. So a full CD copy should take under a minute. Not tens of minutes. If you're copy dozens of CDs to an external drive, that total time could easily be tens of minutes. Have you tried a different USB port on your computer? That can make a difference, depending on what's connected and operating on the PC and it's on internal configuration.Also, it's new enough that it might support USB3. And every new external drive is USB3, it seems. Try connecting as USB3 if possible.

Clinton and Dave, thanks a lot! I know that mp3's are smaller and they don't take nearly as long. I don't know if I have a USB3 on the back so I'll check that out. Thanks again for the replies.

I'd bet it's also related to virus checkers. Most PC virus checkers suck the life out of your performance.