Got given an old macbook air

[koffiejunkie]

I think my kid will be getting it after all. Importing photos was mind boggling slow - curse you USB ports!

I'm thinking of trading my late 2011 MBP for the current version just to get USB3. Still annoyed that they took my expresscard slot away. I repurposed a 2TB WD Green drive from my NAS to be a SuperDuper drive. Doing a backup on USB treacled along at 25MB/s. The enclosure is a StartTech USB2/eSATA enclosure, this drive will do 100MB/s on eSATA

For interest's sake, I have a 2.5" FireWire enclosure that I used to use for SuperDuper backups. When I got my new SSD, I used it to SuperDuper my OS onto it (from the old SSD). FireWire 800 is 800Mbit/s, so 100MB/s, theoretically. The transfer ran at 100MB/s pretty much all the way through. 200GB odd took just under 35 minutes.

Moral of the stories: USB2 sucks.

Speaking of the bechnmark, I usually copy the files onto the HDD/SSD first before starting the import, to remove the USB bottleneck.