I suppose long is a relative term. It took under 24 hours, which I was more than happy to wait for. I think you can use some command line options for scp to tell it to use less strong encryption, but I'm not sure that the transfer was CPU bound. I was transmitting over 10bt and wifi, so I suspect that wifi was the bottleneck.

I always thought that ARM processors were very slow, but it's very capable of running linux apps at a good rate of speed.
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"So I just hooked up ssh and used scp to copy the HDD down. "
So you mean copy the Rio's HDD to your computer's HDD with ssh / scp via ethernet ? Does this take long ?