gigabit speed through router from mac to windows?

[nojohnny101]

hey
first post on macforums, i have been frantically trying to solve a problem for the last couple of days, having contacted multiple IT people and computer geeks but to no alas

thought these forums might be of some help and i am looking forward to contributing as well as this seems to be a tight knit community...


here are the specs of the two machines that i am trying to get to communicate to my satisfaction:

iMac 20 inch (aluminum); 2.4ghz core duo, 2 gig ram, external firewire 800 hard drive (where the data being transfered is).....

Acer, crappy celeron processor, 512mb ram, XP pro...

both machines have a gigabit ethernet card and are connected to a gigabit router (dlink) using standard cat 5 cords...

i have 4 hard drives in the windows machine in RAID 1 configuration each being 500 gig...and i am planned on setting up a type of "server", but not touching the internet, and hoping to be able to get the two to communicate at around gigabit speed so i can use the hard drives as scratch disks for final cut express (dumbed down version of Final Cut Pro)

i can establish a connection between my mac and the two hard drives that are attached to the windows machine just fine using an smb://then the ip address or smb://then the computer name....no problem

problem is transfer speeds, trying to transfer a 428 gig file is estimated at taking just about 32 hours....this tells me that they are communicating through the internet (at internet speeds) and not a direct connection that should transfer at around 1 gig speed....

to do a little narrowing down i connected both computers directly, using an cat 5 ethernet cord, assigned bogus ip's so they could communicate and the speed of the transfer didn't change...

any ideas as to why or what is limiting the speed?

really appreciate any help....sorry for hte long post......

*also if this is in the wrong area, can someone please post where i can put this so it gets noticed by the right people...much appreciate



Thanks
~Will-i-am~

 

[angelwatt]

The problem is your understanding of gigabit, which most people don't understand completely (including myself). Check this post, http://www.computing.net/networking/wwwboard/forum/24913.html

Transfer rate: 128 MB = 1 gigabit (gb) (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-data-transfer-rate.htm)

A gigabit is a unit of measurement used in computers, equal to one billion bits of data. A bit is the smallest unit of data. It takes eight bits to form or store a single character of text. These 8-bit units are known as bytes. Hence, the difference between a gigabit and a gigabyte is that the latter is 8x greater, or eight billion bits.

If you want faster rates I'd recommend getting FireWire ports on the PC and use that for transfers. That's been my best experience so far with what you're doing. There's tutorials for networking machines with FireWire. I've only done it between Macs though so not sure if having Windows in the mix causes any problems.

 

[Le Big Mac]

connected to a gigabit router (dlink) using standard cat 5 cords...

i

The cords could contribute to the problem because cat5 is not strictly speaking gigabit speed--you need 5e or cat 6.

Also, keep in mind that your network is probably not the choke point--rather it's the read/write speed of the drives.