Is This A Normal Backup Speed?

[Mojo]

I'm doing an initial backup of a 2008 C2D iMac drive to an external via Firewire 800. The average transfer rate is around 6MB/s. After 7.25 hours around 154GB has been transferred… It seems like a very long time but then again it is a lot of data.

I need to do another backup external-to-external. The slower enclosure is connected to the iMac via FW 400; the amount of data is around 250GB. What might I expect speed-wise?

[dnanian]

Well, with FW800, I'd generally expect 8-12MB/s. 6 is slow...but newer OS versions seem to be less reliable with FW...it's hard to know what you're going to get, unfortunately.

[Mojo]

OK. The iMac only has 4GB RAM and it is generally running slowly (especially Aperture…) so that might be part of the problem. We are going to max the RAM at 6B; hopefully that will improve things.