USB2? 480Mbps? My Arse.

Today I've been mostly getting the rage with the pathetic performance I get from my Leopard-powered Apple Macbook. 

I have to handle a fairly large amount of data on a day to day basis - things such as VMWare images and the like. My laptop hard disk at some 320Gb is full a lot of the time.... So, I purchase a 250Gb SATA external 2.5" hard disk and cage.... But can I get it to go any faster than 5mb/s? No, I can't. And it's rubbish.

I'm pretty sure this has to be something to do with the MacBook and the fact that the USB drive is currently formatted in NTFS... but 5mb/s? Come on, reminds me back in the day spending all day trying to copy off a failed 120Mb IDE drive......

So, choices, do I re-format with HPFS+ and try it? Ok, here goes.......

.....28Mb/s!! So it's defo the NTFS partitioning. Ok, now that sucks. Because now I have an external drive that works quickly but won't work on any of my work systems directly... I'd have to share it on my Mac and then copy up to the Network.

A New Option is needed. Let me have a think.