Airport Extreme with Cat6 Ethernet

[Naif1992]

Hello guys,

Here is my situation,

I have a Sony Vaio laptop that is connected via a Cat6 cable to my Airport Extreme. I have a bunch of hard drives connected to the laptop via USB 3 and I'm sharing all their contents on my network.

The laptop I use to access those shares is the newest version of the Macbook Air; meaning that it supports AC WiFi.

The problem I'm facing is that the transfer rate of the files over the network is a bit slow: around 12mb/sec. When I first changed from Cat5 to Cat6, it gave me around 65mb/sec. However, now it dropped to 12mb, which is the same rate I used to get when I had my Vaio connected via a Cat5 cable. So right now, I think my Cat6 cable is backwardly compatible to Cat 5.

My question is, why the sudden drop in speed? Is my analysis about backward compatibility correct? Will forcing my laptop, or the Airport Extreme to only accept Cat6 connection help?

Thanks in advance,,,

 

[COrocket]

FYI Cat5 cable is capable of operating at gigabit ethernet speeds, so I doubt that it is a cabling issue. Are you sure the Sony Vaio has a gigabit ethernet port? 12 MB/s (I assume you are talking about MB/s) sounds close to a 100 Mb/s ethernet port limit. Although that wouldn't explain why you were seeing 65 MB/s intermittently.

 

[opinio]

Can you run a test using the MBA with a wired gigabit connection (Apple T-Bolt adapter)? Even though the MBA is current, I am wondering if the AC is an issue or perhaps wifi is an issue such as GHz band conflicts. Your speeds suggest similar to wireless N. If it runs fast on wired then your wifi is the issue. You could perhaps try playing around with different bands in the AirPort App (they are set to auto)

Also, how full are the drives you write to? If they are at max capacity they can run slower as you are on the inside of the platter. Unlikely to be the issue but possible.

Also CAT5 at GbE? Only if the switch and adapter are high-tech enough to support that. As a general rule, CAT5 does not support GbE speeds.