Norton Ghost VERY slow

I have installed Norton Ghost on 3 computers that will all be using the same 3TB External HD, 2 of them across a network. The C-Drive images ran fine in a reasonable amount of time. I then tried to run the FILES/FOLDERS backup on one computer with NOTHING ELSE running on any of the 3. The folder I was backing up contained 225,000 small files in 2721 folders, taking 2.6 GB of disk space. This took 23 HOURS TO COMPLETE!!!!!!!!! 

 

I thought maybe it was just the initial copy that was so slow, so I changed a half-dozen files, and started a new backup (again with no other backups running). After one hour, it had barely progressed through the folders, going at the same pace the original one did, but only scanning for changes this time. This makes this program totally useless to me.

 

NOTE: for the past several years, I have been running a homegrown program on all 3 of these computers that uses DOS XCOPY to backup from the previous day's date. It is VERY fast, and has worked perfectly for years. I wanted to use Ghost to replace this so that I would be able to have multiple copies of each file saved. XCOPY rewrites over the previous backup copy.

 

Can anyone tell me if this is normal for Ghost, or what I can do to fix it to make it usable???? Thanks.