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Aweful "Gigabit" speeds with Time Capsule

T

Toprock

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 4, 2008
8
0
I connected my Macbook to my new Time Capsule with Cat5e cable expecting near gigabit speeds. I tried two separate cables (both cat5e) and both were slower than 14MBps. I know I shouldn't expect the full 128MBps gigabit, but I'm really disappointed.

Has anyone managed to get decent transfers with a Time Capsule?

Is it common for devices advertised as Gigabit to perform more like 100mbps devices?
 
Wow, that's really slow. Connected via Ethernet I get 80Mbps and with Wireless N I get 60Mbps. It should be much higher than 80 connected via Ethernet but nothing works as advertised.
 
Toprock said:
I connected my Macbook to my new Time Capsule with Cat5e cable expecting near gigabit speeds. I tried two separate cables (both cat5e) and both were slower than 14MBps. I know I shouldn't expect the full 128MBps gigabit, but I'm really disappointed.

Has anyone managed to get decent transfers with a Time Capsule?

Is it common for devices advertised as Gigabit to perform more like 100mbps devices?
Click to expand...

Is that transfer speeds to your Time Capsule disk or to other devices on your network?
 
Phew! Okay, there's hope :)

Maybe I'll get a cat6 and a stp cat5e cable and see how they work.
 
flopticalcube said:
Some early reports where showing transfers to the disk itself at around 12-20mbps. My AEBS goes at a blistering 6mbps to the USB disks. To other machines I can get 250mbps via wifi and 400+mbps via ethernet.
Click to expand...

So you're saying it's the Time Capsule write speeds that suck?
 
Is it possible that it's transferring via WiFi even though I'm connected via ethernet?

I'll try disabling my Airport when I get home.
 
Toprock said:
Is it possible that it's transferring via WiFi even though I'm connected via ethernet?

I'll try disabling my Airport when I get home.
Click to expand...

Yes that's definately possible. My macmini used wifi even though I had ethernet connected.
 
i hope your not trying to backup your timemachine, because i get AWFUL write speeds when doing that (600kb-2mb). took me 3 days to backup my imac.

havent tried moving files or anything, im only running on 802.11n at 2.5ghz but :(
 
DoFoT9 said:
i hope your not trying to backup your timemachine, because i get AWFUL write speeds when doing that (600kb-2mb). took me 3 days to backup my imac.

havent tried moving files or anything, im only running on 802.11n at 2.5ghz but :(
Click to expand...

In this case I'm just transfering files.
 
You're not going to get anywhere near actual gigabit speeds. More like uber-megabit. We're not talking about speeds Mac-to-Mac which should be a whole lot faster (but still well under theoretical Gigabit speed that people assume), but Mac-to-TC. If you want network performance beyond the uber-Megabit level on a Gigabit network, you need to invest in a proper high-performance non-Apple (and more expensive) NAS, or a Mac acting as server.
 
Anyone try swapping out a Cat5E cable for a Cat6? I know "theoretically" it won't make a difference but people on the apple site are claiming 10MB/sec (~76mbit) with Cat6 ... still not gigabit ... but marginally better and probably close to the saturation of the controller.
 
10MBytes/sec write speed should be achievable - that's within the Thecus N2100, an 'upper-basic' NAS's speed. Exact throughput will depend on the file sizes too.

5e->6 is unlikely to make any difference. More the sort of data you're trying to pass.

The difference between a relatively low-end NAS like the Time Capsule / the aforementioned N2100 / etc and even a cheap Mac/PC with a gigabit interface is that it's very easy to get throughput in excess of 30MBytes/sec without any special effort with the 'full' computers.
 
I have a 1T TC connected directly with a Cat6 cable and Airport turned off and I get about 12 MB/sec transferring files. Pretty pathetic. I've heard people point out that Gigabit is faster than USB 2.0. True, in theory. In reality, transferring large amounts of data to a USB 2.0 external is radically faster than the Time Capsule. You no longer have a networked drive, but I'm starting to think that since I don't care about backup up my laptop (just my iMac) I may have been better off with a USB drive for use with Time Machine. But I tried that first with a Lacie drive and Time Machine gave me constant errors. And the drive would lock up the Finder... and fail to remount after sleep... etc. Huge pain. I had to restart the drive about once a day. But it was a million times faster. Ugh. BTW... the Lacie drive was formatted properly (G.U.I.D partition and Mac OS Journaled).
 
The slowdown could be anything from inefficient firmware on the NIC, to drivers, to a slow disk interface. If you're not getting GigE speeds with CAT 5e, then changing to CAT 6 is not going to help.

If someone wanted to test it, they could take the drive out of the TC, and place it directly in the machine, or in a USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure to eliminate the TC itself. If the speed persists, which I doubt, then the drive is most likely at fault. My guess is this is something related to the firmware/OS on the TC itself.
 
Takeo said:
I have a 1T TC connected directly with a Cat6 cable and Airport turned off and I get about 12 MB/sec transferring files. Pretty pathetic.
Click to expand...
thats a pretty odd thing to happen. when i transfer files directly via cat5e with my airport turned on (used only by my dads ibook) i get around 25MB/s-30MB/s. i think that its pretty quick, sure it can go way faster but its fine enough for me.

backing up is pathetically slow, mainly because the HD is shooting all over the place searching for files, so that is understandable.

Takeo said:
I've heard people point out that Gigabit is faster than USB 2.0. True, in theory. In reality, transferring large amounts of data to a USB 2.0 external is radically faster than the Time Capsule.
Click to expand...
omg. gigabit IS faster. it is MUCH faster. USB2.0 is probably the most pathetic and useless data transfer types out of the main 5 (ethernet, usb, fw400, fw800, esata).

the problem here is not with the cables, but with either the firmware, the hard drive, or how apple have produced the time capsule.

when i transfer files from my iMac to my MBP via gigabit, i get around 60MB/s-70MB/s copy rate, on the same network if i copy from TC i get around the 30MB/s mark, so gigabit is CLEARLY not the issue here.

if i tried the same thing with my LaCie drive, i would get 20MB's.

Takeo said:
You no longer have a networked drive, but I'm starting to think that since I don't care about backup up my laptop (just my iMac) I may have been better off with a USB drive for use with Time Machine. But I tried that first with a Lacie drive and Time Machine gave me constant errors. And the drive would lock up the Finder... and fail to remount after sleep... etc. Huge pain. I had to restart the drive about once a day. But it was a million times faster. Ugh. BTW... the Lacie drive was formatted properly (G.U.I.D partition and Mac OS Journaled).
Click to expand...

LaCie drives are pathetic, dont even buy them they are a waste of time. they have caused every computer i have put them on to crash and burn (so to speak).



belvdr said:
The slowdown could be anything from inefficient firmware on the NIC, to drivers, to a slow disk interface. If you're not getting GigE speeds with CAT 5e, then changing to CAT 6 is not going to help.

If someone wanted to test it, they could take the drive out of the TC, and place it directly in the machine, or in a USB 2.0/Firewire enclosure to eliminate the TC itself. If the speed persists, which I doubt, then the drive is most likely at fault. My guess is this is something related to the firmware/OS on the TC itself.
Click to expand...

yes i agree, if someone had the time to test it i am sure they would find that the errors lye in the coding of the TC, or the firmware. it could possibly be from the way apple error checks data read/written? maybe because it is a 'backup' drive they implement a more robust method of checking errors? eh
 
Hello all,

Let's get one thing straight:

Mb/s or Mbps is Mega bit per second (b=bit)

MB/s or MBps is Mega Byte per second (B=Byte)

So a "B" is 8 times more data that a "b" :)

I recently came over form the PC universe, and I've never seen Gb networks running at 1000 Mb/s. A good setup with good cables and a proper Gb switch gives you more like 250 Mb/s. That's about 30 MB/s, wich is close to copying from disk to disk in the real world (not one large file, but several files in different sizes). To have higher performance than that, you need faster disks :)

A typical 300 GB harddrive is 300.000 MB meaning it'll take 10.000 seconds to back up. That's about 3 hours...
 
EdbBob said:
Hello all,

1. Let's get one thing straight:

Mb/s or Mbps is Mega bit per second (b=bit)

MB/s or MBps is Mega Byte per second (B=Byte)

So a "B" is 8 times more data that a "b" :)

2. I recently came over form the PC universe, and I've never seen Gb networks running at 1000 Mb/s. A good setup with good cables and a proper Gb switch gives you more like 250 Mb/s. That's about 30 MB/s, wich is close to copying from disk to disk in the real world (not one large file, but several files in different sizes). To have higher performance than that, you need faster disks :)

3. A typical 300 GB harddrive is 300.000 MB meaning it'll take 10.000 seconds to back up. That's about 3 hours...
Click to expand...

1. yea everyone forgets, i know i do. most of the time i will put megaBytes, or megaBits. depending on the situation.

2. firstly, welcome! a very wise choice! secondly, everything is a lie, so nothing is as they say!
personally, copying large files over my gigabit network can be anywhere from 20-50MBps, reading from sata300 drives is much faster.

3. i reckon the typical speeds will dramatically increase, especially since sata 300 has come about, read/write speeds can easily go above 40MBps. so yea.. go hard drive s:)
 
Hello guys!
I have the same! I am really disappointed with the ethernet speed of my TC...

I have a cat 5 cable and cat 6, does change a thing...

When copying files over the network, I get between 10 to 15 Mb/s or (80 to 120 MB/s)

I believe this is extremely slow for gigabit.. I now I should not expect to get 100 Mb/s (800 MB/s) as my hard drive would certainly not follow... But a good 50 Mb/s (400MB/s) should be totally doable... and this is apparently not the case for everyone of us...


ps: I forgot to mention that my TC is connected to my network and is set up as a bridge... But I'm directly connected to the TC so the speed between the mac and the TC should be Gigabit and then it should go to 100 MB/s (12,5 Mb/s) for the rest of the network? or am I wrong somewhere?
 
i might have said this already, but yea - the culprit seems to be the HD (though i thought it was a "server grade HD", havent pulled it apart to find out). if it is gigabit ethernet then there should be no problem there.

Matsuto, can i ask what computer you are copying from? what is the HD specs that are in that machine (dekstop/laptop HD, rpm, etc).
 
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