I recently got a Seagate External harddrive with a USB 3.0 connection on it.
My Mac only has a USB 2.0 port, but its cool because they are backwards compatible.
I plug it in and start the transfer, and it is dreadfully slow! Im talking maybe 10mbps
What gives?
USB 2.0 runs at about 12 mbps on average. What exactly were you expecting?
USB 2.0 is 480Mbps or over 50 MegaBytes/second.
So, getting less than 2 MegaBytes/second is not normal.
ETA: Make sure there are no USB 1 devices on that port - USB 1 runs at 11Mbps.
In theory, USB 2.0 runs at 480 Mbps (60 MBps) according to wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#USB_2.0
In the real world, you won’t get that, but 240 Mbps (30 MBps) would not be unreasonable.
First decide whether your speed is really 12 megabits per second or 12 megabytes per second. The first one is REALLY slow. The second one is a bit slow, but may be explainable. For example, transfering information that is spread in small bits within the (internal or external) drive will really slow down performance. This has nothing to do with the connection speed, it is all about the hard drive speed.
Which way is the data going, to or from the external drive?
Are you transferring few large files, or thousands of small files? The bookkeeping of creating thousands of files often overwhelms the time taken to actually transfer the data, and that’s an issue that no amount of USB throughput speed can really solve.
Sometimes people think, “well I transferred 2 GB last week and it was really fast, now I’m transferring 2 GB today and it’s really slow” without pausing to consider that last week it was a single large .zip file and today it’s 24,000 small text files.
(Although increasing the drive’s seek time would help. Since you’re talking about a USB drive, it’s probably 5400 RPM or at best 7200 RPM. I’m sure a SSD would have no problem running at full USB2 speeds, even with thousands of tiny files.)