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Networking over Thunderbolt: worth it?

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NotJohnnyQuest

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 26, 2009
73
2
Hi guys,

So at work we currently have two iMacs we're using running Mavericks. We have these networked over Ethernet with a router in between (a bottleneck?), and we're getting less than satisfactory file transfer/access speeds (we work with a lot of large .psd files).

I notice we have Thunderbolt ports on both of our iMacs. Would it be worth it to grab the $60 10-foot Thunderbolt cable and network our iMacs via Thunderbolt? Would we theoretically get better speeds doing this than networking via our current setup?
 
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dyn

macrumors 68030
Aug 8, 2009
2,708
388
.nl
Not quite. This is a software only implementation (the next generation of Thunderbolt will have a hardware implementation). If you run it between 2 Macs there will not be a problem but when you add another Mac the cpu usage will go up quite a lot. The more you add the lower the speed will be (and the slower the Macs will be). If you really want fast networking you need to go to things like 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Infiniband (if OS X supports it properly).

The best thing to do in this case is to start with some basic troubleshooting. How is your network setup? What speeds are you getting? And so on. If you post it in this topic this will also help others to find a solution to your (or their) problem. Immediately throwing more power at it is never the correct solution when you are having performance issues!
 
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