I just bought a Western Digital 250 GB My Book for my PC. It is connected through a USB 2.0 PCI hub that had not caused me any problems with my iPod in the past. When I transfer files from my Boot drive to the external everything goes very smoothly and quickly. However, when I try to transfer back to the Boot drive it takes forever. I tried to transfer a 350 Mb video file and I let it run overnight and 8 hours later it was still less than half done and it said it would take another 183 minutes, exactly what it said when I left it the night before. Is there some way to make file transferring faster, or for that matter even possible between these two drives. I'm going nuts because I moved all of my digital pictures onto this drive and if this is a permanent problem then I need to figure out how to retrieve them.

Try to bypass the USB hub and connect it directly to your computer. See if that makes a faster transfer or not.

no way should it take that long
bad hub or power problem
make sure on long tranfers that the external is well cooled