Scratch that last message. I removed the drive to verify the copied content on another machine and realized I forgot to copy one folder. Plugged it back, with the wrong connector, using the Firewire instead of USB, probably because my mind was still on the Firewire issue.

This time round, gnome desktop automounted the drive and there it was on my desktop to my surprise.

Checking with mount
/dev/sde1 on /media/My Book type vfat (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,shortname=winnt,uid=502)

I've no idea why or what happened, just glad it works! :D

Now testing it out with another day's data about 112G worth and Nautilus is estimating about 60 minutes, so that's about 31.8MB/s or 29% faster. Although Nautilus was a bit optimistic with the previous transfer so the Firewire still likely a good 20% to 25% faster.