fig, I think I figured out the reason behind my slow transfers. My WD 750GB appears to be the problem, combined with the program. Some catastrophic I/O errors clued me in
I tested with a different physical drive and the speeds were closer to what you mentioned. With further testing, the fastest speeds I got were the usage of 3 different physical drives. Drive 1 has the program and temp files (SATA, NTFS), Drive 2 is the write source (SATA, NTFS), and Drive 3 is the read source (USB, WBFS). That gave me about 4 minutes for 2.6GB transfer. Making Drive 1 the write source and removing Drive 2 from the picture, that same transfer increased a minute to 5 minutes total.
These two drives tested were identical Seagate 320GBs. It appears that temp files definitely do slow down transfer speeds. An on-the-fly method, as you already know, would be even faster and should produce transfer speeds similar to WBFS Manager 3.0's transfer speeds. The operations aren't quite the same, of course.
I tested with a different physical drive and the speeds were closer to what you mentioned. With further testing, the fastest speeds I got were the usage of 3 different physical drives. Drive 1 has the program and temp files (SATA, NTFS), Drive 2 is the write source (SATA, NTFS), and Drive 3 is the read source (USB, WBFS). That gave me about 4 minutes for 2.6GB transfer. Making Drive 1 the write source and removing Drive 2 from the picture, that same transfer increased a minute to 5 minutes total.
These two drives tested were identical Seagate 320GBs. It appears that temp files definitely do slow down transfer speeds. An on-the-fly method, as you already know, would be even faster and should produce transfer speeds similar to WBFS Manager 3.0's transfer speeds. The operations aren't quite the same, of course.