koppit,

Welcome to Justlinux!

USB 1.1 is rated at 12 Mbit/s whereas the standard USB 2.0 runs at 480Mbit/s. The ratio is is a 40-fold increase.

I would take the laptop disks and mounted them as internal disks (with 2.5" to 3.5" disk adaptors) in a desktop PC to speed things up. Internal disks can run at 3 to 5 times faster than the fastest USB.