Faster way to transfer between ext USB HDs?

[Vashar]

I've managed to fill a 300 GB external HD and two 500 GB HDs with various things from early 2000 to now and I'm looking to consolidate it all to 1 TB external HD that I just got and give the older smaller HDs to family. My problem is that I exclusively use laptops and my current one has limited USB slots. I use a full sized USB keyboard G15 and full sized USB mouse and that leaves 1 free USB slot. I have a 4 port hub (that works when it wants to) and my G15 has 2 extra USB slots.

Copying all the files from the old external HD to the new one is taking forever. I left them running for 24 hours and it has only completed 20%. This is with both HDs connected to the USB ports on my G15 keyboard. I didn't get any message that said they could perform better on a high speed port, so I doubt that's what's limiting it. I'm on Vista, but have SP1 installed and have Directory Opus as my file manager.

How can I speed up the process a bit?

 

[r-sky]

Try it without any other usb devices connected... just the hard drives

 

[dallasjoh]

The usb ports on the G15 KB are mainly for flash drives. They do not run at 2.0 even though you did not get a warning they are still not as fast as connected straight to your laptop. My suggestion would be to use a PS/2 mouse if possible until you get all your data transferred. If there is no PS/2 port you can purchase one of these to help speed things along and they work great. Check the link.
http://www.directron.com/sbtp2d.html

 

[Vashar]

I didn't realize the G15 port were not 2.0. Thanks for the tip. I just plugged my mouse into my G15 and used the remaining 2 USB slots for the HDs and they're transferring much much faster now. Closer to the 20-40 MB/s I usually got from transferring to the individual USB drives from my internal.