Transfer speed to Airport Disk?

I have a 300GB LaCie connected to the USB2 port on my Airport Extreme Base Station. So far, this arrangement seems to be working fine in Leopard--but I'm wondering if the data-transfer rate is abnormally slow.
I have the Wireless Radio Mode set to 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible) (unfortunately, I can't go 802.11n only, or my TiVo can't connect), and the iMac I'm on is only a few feet away from the Base Station. I'm transfering a 3.5GB iMovieHD file from the iMac to the 300GB LaCie right now, and the total transfer time is about 42 minutes. Does this seem normal?

There's a bit of confusion in this thread about speeds.
Data transfer speeds are sometimes given in MegaBITS per second Mb/s and sometimes given in MegaBYTES per second MB/s. (it's easy to get them confused)
The Airport Extreme's wireless is rated at 270Mb/s.
That number does not reflect real world use (but all manufacturers use the theoretical value) What it means is that this is the maximum number of bits per second going in both directions including all the overhead stuff.
What is the maximum real world speed? In the real world the best speed you'll see copying a file from one place to another is 10MegaBYTES per second. This is very fast wireless very similar to wired ethernet. It can only be achieved when the Airport is set to 5GHz radio mode.
The USB hard drive does not achieve this speed. The CPU in the base station struggles to cope with files systems and the drive. So reading and writing you get between 3 and 6 MegaBYTES per second. The same drive would be 4 or 5 times quicker if it were plugged into your computer.
Using a NAS is faster. But this is plenty fast enough for streaming HD videos.
Jon,
Your speed is about half the regular speed for copying. Not massively slow but slower than I'd expect.
Try connecting at 5GHz n-only.
And use the graph device in Airport Utility to see if you have a poor signal strength.

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    ****Please click on Accept As Solution if a suggestion solves your problem. It helps others facing the same problem to find a solution easily****
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