Files Transfer / External Drive Question

I have a laptop with Windows 2000 Pro, an internal hard drive formatted as FAT32, and a PCMCIA adapter which has 2x USB2 and 2x Firewire ports.

To this laptop I have an external hard drive attached via the Firewire connection on the PCMCIA card. The external hard drive is formatted as NTFS.

I was transfering a folder with several files which amounted to about 250Mb. This was the result:


When copying from Laptop HD to External HD, it took about 1 minute to transfer.

When copying the same files from External HD to the Laptop HD, it took about 15 minutes or so.

Can anyone comment on why the big difference in time to copy?

Does it have anything to do with the fact that one HD is NTFS and the other is FAT32?

Thanks