Are copies using rsync faster than using Finder?

So - I have a question about using rsync in Terminal. I need to move a Time Machine backup off of an external drive in order to reformat it. The 'backups' folder is nearly 300 GB. At first I tried to use CarbonCopyCloner to create a sparseimage on the disk I am moving the data to. That didn't work because, according to Bombich, TM backups are treated differently and can't be processed by CCC.

Then I decided to use Disk Utility to create a new 300GB SparseImage on the destination and use rsync to copy the backup folder to the new SparseImage. I used the rsync commands (sudo rsync -va --progress )and dragged the source and destination paths into the Terminal window. After I authenticated, Terminal started creating a list of files to deal with - but this listing task went on for hours, which seems to completely defeat the idea of creating an efficient transfer. What did I do wrong? Should I not have asked for verbose responses - or did I make some other error.

Eventually the task completed, but it took over two days using a USB 2 wired connection. Would this have taken the same amount of time if I had just dragged the folder across using Finder?

Obviously - I am a noob with Terminal, so any help will be much appreciated.