Very slow copying of files to external hard drive

Dear all,
I've been finding that my MacBook Pro (a 2007 model running Snow Leopard) is extremely slow to copy files over to an external hard drive. The hard drive is connected via Firewire and is perfectly fine with my (Tiger) desktop G5. When I say slow, I mean that the progress monitor is counting in individual bytes.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Roger

I've tried again with a different cable and the firewire 400 (which is certainly what I'm using) still proves appallingly slow when I'm trying to copy files from my MacBook to the drive. The other way round (External HD to computer) is just fine.
Sounds like a hardware problem. In order to troubleshoot it, you'd need to try a different FW HD. If it did the same thing, it would suggest an issue with the MBP's FW port/bus. If it worked fine, then it would suggest an issue with the first FW HD, likely with the circuitry, as has been surmised before (the HD itself may be just fine, and could be transferred into a different enclosure).
I would try firewire 800, but assume that you can't have a connector which is 800 one end and 400 the other: both HDs are firewire 400 and I want to carry on using them ...
800 is backwards compatible with 400, so you actually can, but it will operate at the 400 speed; in any case, no reason to mess with that here.
One of my HDs, a later model, has a USB connector built in. I tried copying from the MacBook to the HD using the USB and it was very fast.
Sounds like you've narrowed it down to a FW issue, as described above.
I'm wondering whether this is, as one of the other correspondents surmises, an OSX 6.3 problem ...?
I strongly doubt it. I'm on 10.6.3 and have done SuperDuper backups/Time Machine backups/large file transfers, and all have behaved just as they did before 10.6.3. I read all the posts that come through here, and there is no widespread issue (normally, when something like that happens, there will be many posts about it; if fact, there are usually many posts after any major update/upgrade, when people believe the update/upgrade has done something to their machines, but I've been surprised at the low number after 10.6.3, at least here in this forum, and 10.6.3 was a very large update).
Would be very interested to know your informed thoughts.
Some thoughts:
-as mentioned above, try a different FW HD on that same MBP port to determine if the port is operating correctly.
-if the port does function properly, get a new enclosure and install the HD from the FW enclosure (USB enclosures, if you're satisfied with their speed, are very inexpensive, sometimes as low as $10 or so). Check out Macsales, Newegg and Amazon for some ideas/examples, or if you want to see hundreds of them, google it.
-if the port is the issue, you may want to get used to using USB or get a FW800 HD enclosure. Obviously there is no guarantee the FW800 port/bus is functioning properly, but I think the odds would be good.
Message was edited by: tjk

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Let's also say the folder you're trying to copy is your Documents folder.
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find /home/robert -user robert -exec ls {} \;
{} is the filename
\; is the required characters for lineend
Message was edited by: rccharles

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Very slow copying of files to external hard drive

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