My Book 1TB Slow To Transfer

I bought this drive and installed the Smartware software backed everything up but noticed a considerable taxing on my CPU and RAM.  It went from like 6% usage all the way up to 30-40%!  So I wiped the drive and uninstalled the WD Program and now am running Time Machine to back it up.  The good news is my resource usage is way down and back to normal, the bad news is that this back up is taking forever to complete.  Is this normal?  I knew it would be slow using a serial 2.0 but at this rate it will take all day. So far it has transferred 90GB in like 5 hours.  

BTW I am running a new Imac 21.5 inch with the i3 processor and 4 GB RAM if that helps.

Is there any way to speed up this transfer?

By matching the file systems between which the data are transferred, I speeded up the rate from 1GB- / hr to 20GB+/hr.  Do the two file systems match each other in your scenario?

Cheers!

Richard