Network transfer speed between 2 wired computers

[dominican2589]

My set up is a vista computer, an xp computer and a linksys WRT54GS. Both computers are wired. I tried transferring a 1gb file. I was not getting any speeds higher than 1 MB/s. Anyone know what could be the problem? I would understand if it was a wireless connection but both are wired. Both say they have a 100Mbps connection. I know that is just the connection and would not really reach those speeds but it should at least be higher than 1MB/s

 

[KSoD]

Are you sure they are not using the WiFi connection to transfer? That would be my guess. It should be higher than 1MB/s. But if they are using the WiFi connection and not the wired that would be why.

 

[dominican2589]

I am positive. I have them connected through a wire. there is no way that they are connected through wifi

 

[Lexluethar]

Have you tried timing your transfer? I realize it is reading 500kb to 1 mb per second transfter but have you actually transfered a large 1 gb file and seen how long it took?

I'm thinking maybe the OS is reading the transfer speed wrong.

 

[dominican2589]

I think I found what the problem is. On one of the computers, I have two IDE drives, one is in master, and the other in slave, on the same IDE cable. One has Windows and the other one I just use for data. After running pcpitstop's full system scan, it said that my data harddrive was only transferring at 2MB/s. So I guess thats why the speed never went up.

Now I gotta figure out why the slow transfer data speeds are occurring on my data harddrives. They should both be working the same at the same speed right?

 

[KSoD]

If 1 system has SATA HDD's and the other IDE then no they would not transfer at the same speed. The SATA Drives are much faster than IDE. SATAII is even faster than just SATA.

 

[CalcProgrammer1]

I have two IDE systems and transferring over network between them usually gets 10MB/s (megabytes per second). My Ethernet (campus LAN) is a 100mb connection (megabits not megabytes). The bottleneck isn't your hard drive (ATA [IDE] drives are 133mb/s and SATA are 1.5 or 3 gb/s [both bits, not bytes]).

 

[dominican2589]

The reason I think its the drive is because also transfering from the main harddrive to the other harddrive takes a long time. on both of my desktops for some reason the drive that i use just for data, that i added on after purchasing the machines, have a slow throughput. transfering a 700mb file on the same computer from my data drive to my main drive took 6min and 45secs. now if i set the transfer speed to be 2MB/s, it would take 5.83 mins. so the transfer speed was actually slower than 2MB/s.

 

[UnderMediKated]

Hook them up direct connect or buy a couple of cheap gigabit nic's

I have a Linksys wireless router with a Linksys switch. I have 3, sometimes 4 desktops plugged in and an Xbox (wired), laptop (wireless), a TIVO (wireless) and a PS3 (wireless) hooked to the router. The trasnfer speeds are not blazing but good. If you only have 2 computers wire them up to each other and try ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) and see if that helps. Hook the master computer directly to the cable(?) modem and leave off the router.

When you buy a new hard drive look for rotational speed and cache size, not just SATA 3.0 or IDE 133 etc. SATA is nice as it eliminates alot of cabling.

If you get a good drive with 16meg buffer and 7200-10000 RPM rotational speed it will cook!

 

[dominican2589]

I did a test. I took the IDE cable for my CD/DVD drives and just plugged in my data harddrive into it. I did the same file and it took only 25secs to transfer. There is something that is slowing my harddrive speeds when they are on the same IDE cable. I checked my harddrive model and its 7200rpm with a 16mb cache so I should be getting fast speeds

the network speeds have also improved now. The harddrive transfer speeds must have been what was causing it to happen

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I think I found out what the problem was. For some reason, DMA was not being enabled on my data drive. After doing the switch as i said above, I went into the settings and it does show DMA is available for both now, not just the main harddrive. Even though it is faster, it still takes longer to transfer than if i had them on separate IDE cables