used my backup program to copy the files, one at a time, in alphabetical order
How sure are you that it copied them one at a time? That's a severely non-optimal strategy for a backup program; unless the destination drive is much slower than the source drive, it can go faster by having lots of simultaneous outstanding requests against the source drive. Ironically this is especially the case if the source drive is fragmented: because Windows and/or the drive will elevator-sort the requests, the average seek between requests is shorter (quicker) the more files are being copied simultaneously.
I'll try doing it again, this time from a c:> prompt using xcopy. I think that it will be a long process, though, because if I recall correctly the copying is much slower, probably to do with RAM caching or something.
Or possibly because, unlike a decent backup program, it copies the files one at a time?
Peter
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