I forgot to add... You mentioned the data size was only 5gb. Does the partition take up the entire disk? If so, you can mount the / partition and do something like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/mount/mypartition/foobar.tmp bs=1024k", then "rm /mount/mypartition/foobar.tmp". This fills up the unused space with all zero's and should greatly speed up your image transfers.