Secondary Hard Drive Transfer Rate Slower Then Usual?

[Tyorik]

My secondary hard drive - a 250 gb Western Digital SATA drive, seems to be unusually slow... Or maybe I just expected more when using this to store the majority of my files instead of my 500 gb My Book Western Digital through USB. My average transfer rate is 50 mb/s, which is good I guess, granted, but shouldn't it transfer faster than that? Or are my expectation way too high?

[Paul Komski]

DMA should be enabled - if by any chance it has been disabled.

I would expect a SATA to be faster than an external USB drive as long as you are comparing like with like. It takes longer to transfer lots of small or fragmented files, for example, than one large contiguous file.