Coupla TM questions:

1. I recently bought a tiny Western Digital "My Passport" USB hard drive, with a capacity of 500 Gb. I have been using it for Time Machine only, as a cheap replacement for a large Firewire 800 RAID drive. This evening I noticed it was doing a backup, so I clicked the Time Machine icon to see how fast it was working. Answer: as slow as dogsh*t (maybe slower). The device is actually working, but oh, so slowly. Is this normal behavior for a USB hard drive? Are they really this slow (1 Gb per hour, more or less)?

2. I read somewhere that one should never store ordinary files on the same disk as a Time Machine backup. Is this correct? What is the risk?

Loren