I recently purchased a Maxtor OneTouch 4 500GB external USB2 drive. Running backups and restores under Vista SP1 were about twice as slow as expected.
Research led me to this hotfix by Microsoft, kb954052. Applying this hotfix cut down the backup/restore times by 1/2 to where they should be.
Now that everything is nice and fast in Vista I can't say the same for the bootable version of Ghost 14. It's about twice as slow as it should be. Sound familar? My guess is that your PE system on the boot disk is Vista without the hotfix resulting in the same slow speeds.
Could you look into this hotfix and see if you agree with me? If so how can I get this hotfix onto my boot disk?