Ethernet: iMac to iMac faster than iMac to MBP

[kwfl]

hi

I have a 24" high-specced iMac and a MBP. I normally transfer files between these macs using AFP using an airport extreme with gigabit support and gigabit cables on both macs. The speed maxes at 45MB/s and is normally in the range 20-40MB/s

I bought my friend a 24" iMac and i was transferring a sum of 30GB of toast images. I went to wash my face and came back to see the transfer almost finished. initially i thought i selected around 10GB to transfer, but i was right, it was transferring the 30GB and it is almost finished.

when i looked to the istat menus stats. The speed is around 75MB/s and the maximium was 80MB/s. Wow. These are fabulous speeds.

is it due to SATA300 interface on the internal HDD in the iMacs and the sata150 in the MBP internal HDD?

or it is just these iMacs are crazy machines ..?...

Thanks.

 

[tsvb]

I would say the speed and interface of the MBP hard disk would be some sort of bottle neck in this case. Clearly the two machines have the same capability when it comes to network transfer but my guess is the read/write on the hdd's are quite different.

 

[Vanarak19]

Imacs have 3.5" drives in them.. The MBP only has a slower 2.5" HD in it.

THats the culprit. To Test:

plug one of the Imacs into the MBP via Firewire.
hold 'T' when booting that Imac, and hold "alt" when booting the pro
boot from the pro the targeted Imac drive

plug the pro into the gigabit interface, and watch to see if you can repeat the imac to imac transfer speeds through the pro interface.

?


it all depends which way the transfer is going too. If you are going from the MBP to IMAC, the read speeds shouuld be enough to saturate the gigabit connection on the PRO. If your going from Imac to MBP, the write speeds on the MBP (transfering from the IMAC) might not be able to keep up with the Gigabit connection

 

[trip1ex]

It could be the ethernet cables too.

But yeah the iMacs have 7200rpm hard drives while the Macbook Pro likely has a 5400 rpm hard drive.

Also the iMacs tend to have larger hard drives and those generally have faster transfer speeds regardless of rpms because they have a higher data density.

So in effect a double whammy.

Plus how full your hard drive is and fragmentation affect speeds. The fuller the hard drive the slower it goes.