Why is the data transfer rate so slow on my external USB 2.0 drive?

OK - font of all knowledge (!) wikipedia says that for a USB 2.0 interface, the theoretical maximum transfer rate is 480 Mbps (mega bits per second). Hence I think the Disk Utility is incorrectly overstating your USB drive - this should probably be filed as a bug.

I know there is an issue with NTFS, but from the screen-shot it looks like you are using EXT4, so this is not the issue.

The theoretical speed is max 60MB/s. However, I've read various reports such as this (also look at the transfer rate article in the wikipedia link) that state that you could expect half-of this rate. Thus, your drive is probably running as fast as it can.

For better speeds, use either a SATA II external disk or try a USB3.0 interface card + USB 3.0 External Hard-drive.

Suggest also confirm your drive rate using some command line tools as described here. It would be interesting to see how accurate Nautilus is reporting the transfer rate compared to the command line tools as per this link.

It is also worth booting with pci=routeirq in your kernel grub option - sometimes IRQ issues slow down hard-drive read/writes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Megabytes are not the same as Megabits...

The USB 2.0 standard states speeds up to 480Mbps... that is a lower "b" which means bits...

Nautilus says you are moving data 12MBps, that is a capital B, which are bytes.

1 byte = 8 bits

12MB (megabytes) = 96Mb (megabits)

Besides, those speeds are "lab speeds" which means that they happened at the perfect circumstances but they always vary from hardware to hardware, much like the 56kbps modems never actually connected above 48kbps.

I have similar problems after upgrading to Lubuntu 12.04 and had similar problems with Maverick.

After updating Maverick last summer the problem solved itself.

Now I cleaned my external hard drive with Gparted and reformatted it to ext4.

After that the first thing that happened is that I got no write access to the hard drive. Only after binding it into the system as owner I got access.

I find this really funny because it is an external hard drive and yes, I am the physical owner of them and they are just storage.

You do not have a problem with ownership on FAT32 partitions.

Transferring files from my computers hard drive to the external made me sad because I had no trouble with it before and now I got some invalid file name errors. Since I have the bad habit to play a simple game when I need to wait for tasks to finish I opened Majong and thought first this might be the reason for the trouble. Then I realized that the error might be related to a few files named in another language and changed the system language to repeat the procedure.

Guess what, it worked just fine.

Now the thing I would need help with is how to alter the USB problem that was fixed with Ubuntu 10.10 and Lubuntu 11.10.

The second would be just a simple answer to why I need to have ownership established for an ext4 formatted disk and might use any FAT32 or NTFS without such a need.