How to speed up rsync?

I’m running rsync to sync a directory onto my external USB HDD. It’s about 150 gigs of data. 50000+ files I would guess.

It’s running it’s first sync at the moment, but its copying files at a rate of only 1-5 MB/s. That seems incredibly slow for a USB 2.0 enclosure. There are no other transfers happening on the drive either.

Here are the options I used:

rsync -avz --progress /mysourcefolder /mytargetfolder

I’m running Ubuntu Server 9.10.

For the first sync just use

cp -a  /mysourcefolder /mytargetfolder

rsync only adds overhead when the destination is empty.

also.. the -z option is probably killing your performance, you shouldn’t be using it if you are not transfering data over a slow link.