New Hard Drive

It twas foggy this morning. It made for interesting sights. As I was driving Quinn to school the sun finally started being visible through the clouds. It was odd seeing the outline of the sun and having it be no brighter than what you would expect the moon to normally be. It made everything seem very surreal. Catherine wasn't with us. That's because she was at home with Ginger preparing to go to the doctor. Her finger had swollen up and we think it got infected, so Ginger was taking Catherine to the doctor this morning to have it checked out. And sure enough it was indeed infected and Catherine is now on some antibiotics.

When I got home tonight I was pleasantly surprised to see that my new 500 Gig external hard drive had arrived. I ordered a new drive since both the drives in my old computer only had a couple of Gig left on them and the laptop which has a 40 Gig drive also only has about 2 Gig left. And given I need somewhere to put new pictures that I take I need more space. And at the rate I take pictures those couple of Gigs wouldn't last long at all. And that's why I bought the new drive. So I pulled it out and plugged it in and then plugged in an external casing with an old drive in it and did a bulk copy from the old drive to the new one. A full hour and a half later and I'm still waiting for the copy to complete. My guess is copying about 250 Gig of data over USB connections isn't the fastest way to do it. The little copy window sat there at "Preparing to copy files" for a full fifteen minutes before it even started copying any data. And normally the copy window has a time remaining on it, but that's not even there so who know how long this is going to end up taking in the end. After an hour and a half the progress bar is about 1/10 of the way through so I'm thinking I have a while left to go.

Time goes by....

I can't pull the pictures I took today until the copy completes (out of USB ports). So at this point it's been three and a half hours since I started the copy and I'm about 1/4 through the progress bar. After examining one of the files it's copying I see it's copying about 170 MB every 12 seconds or so. Quick back of the envelope calculations tell me at that speed it will take about five hours to copy 250 Gig. And I'm guessing for smaller files the throughput is much less. So from the looks of things there's still another three hours to go on the copy at least. So I'm just going bail on trying to get pictures up tonight and post something tomorrow morning.