Connect drive directly to mac?
 

Does it matter in terms of back up speed if my target ext fw drive is connected directly to my mac or connected to another ext fw drive that's connected directly to my mac?

Certainly can matter, depending on the drives involved...

So this means that the SD back up may be slower but will it be affected in any other way?

Mike

No, it means that it's hard to say what might happen. It depends on the quality of the drive's bridges, how sensitive the drives are, cabling, etc...

I've yet to be able to clone my 1TB internal drive to a Seagate Go Flex since upgrading to Lion. Copy speed is about 12 mb/sec. I let it run overnight, but it only gets about 10-15% complete. Any ideas? I'm now going directly from my Mac to the Go Flex, but it looks like it's still crawling.

12MB/s is not crawling... did you add the destination to the spotlight privacy tab (in system preferences)?

No. Should I do that?

It'll certainly speed things up.