Holy Cow! Seven days to copy my iPhone library to a new external HD?

Wow - I've just begun to move my iPhoto Library File (about 80GB - over 12,000 photos and videos) from the internal HD of my black MacBook running Lion, to a new external WesternDigital My Book with 1TB of space.   I did check the info for the new drive in Lion and it says that it is Mac OS Extended (Journaled).  
It looks like the iPhoto Library file is just one big file (not a folder filled with photo and video files).
My questions is that the "Copy" dialog box shows that is at "358.9 MB of 79.76 GB - About 8 Days" - could this be correct?  Yikes!!! Although it appears to be coping at a rate of about 1 MB per minute this seems to be very slow.  I expected it to take several hours - but 8 days?
My black MacBook is a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of 667 Mhz DDR SDRAM and I'm running Lion 10.7.1
I've now gone from 7 days to 9 days... :-(
Any ideas, suggestions or help?
Thanks in advance ... Tom

1. The Finder is a liar and notoriously inaccurate at these kinds of estimates. Yes, migrating this amount of data will take a while - just how much depends on a number of factors - but we're talking hours and not days.
2. Since iPhoto 7 (iLife 08) the old iPhoto Library Folder is a Package File. This is simply a folder that looks like a file in the Finder. Inside the package are lots of files and folders.
Regards
TD

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