Is my math correct?
 

I purchased SD! yesterday to begin a backup plan in our department. These consist of Macs with a fresh install of the OS, Final Cut Studio, Adobe Production suite, and six user accounts. The space used on the HD is ~80GB. I am using a FW LaCie drive connected to the front port. The Macs are Intel 2x2.8 GHz with 6GB of RAM.

The SD! interface shows that in 18.5 hours there have been 7.85GB copied with an effective copy speed of 0.12 MB/s. It is taking ~2.35hrs/gig and at this speed it will take about 7 more days to finish? Is my math correct?

Thanks.

Forgot to mention the FW partition had 160GB of space and I had formatted it with Disk Utility before starting SD. I chose the "Backup - all files" option.

That's extremely slow. Do you have other devices attached to FireWire? Is the drive powered? Are you writing directly to the drive, or to an image?

There are no other devices connected and it is powered. I was trying to write directly to the drive. There were no other apps running and we do not have antivirus software installed. I decided to stop the process knowing the drive would be unstable but now it's unusable. Disk Utility will not recognize it for me to format. The light on the drive continues to poll but it never mounts nor appears in DU. Not sure what has happened but why is the drive unusable? Very hesitant to use SD again.

SuperDuper! does not interact with the drive at a hardware level in ANY way. The warning that we give when you 'stop' is simply to let you know that the drive will be in an "unknown" state: that is, you can't know what files are there and what aren't, or if you're in the middle of creating an image, the intermediate products won't be deleted. It has nothing to do with it being "unstable" at all.

It looks to me like you had a hardware failure of some sort, which would also explain why things were going so slowly.