USB 2 Speeds on intel iMac

[Rychiar]

okay i have a 24" intel imac from 2 years ago and it has USB2 ports on the back right, well if i plug in a flash drive and take files from the drive to the computers they transfer at USB2 speeds. But when i go the other day and copy from the mac to the USB drive it's slow as hell. like USB1 or worse speeds. I can't figure out why. It's not like that on my PC at work which has similar specs to the imac. Anyway know why the USB up would be so slow?

 

[covertsurfer]

I have my flash drive plugged in the back and it is transferring slowly, 350mb took about 8 minutes.

This can't be right?

 

[StealthRider]

Are you copying off of an external hard drive or something similar? Or are you doing something CPU-intensive at the same time? USB requires a fair bit of processor overhead.