[dnanian]

No, an external FW drive -- which doesn't run remotely as fast as 50MB/s, that a raw protocol speed -- will run about 6MB/s for a Power PC based mac, and about 12MB/s for an Intel.

We're really not CPU bound, we're I/O bound. And yes, things can slow down that much. But, as I said, Smart Update will be much faster after the first backup is done.