I am using Setup Assistant to restore a 400GB Time Machine (stored on the new TC) to my 15" 2.3/16/1 TB/750 M. It's took 8 hours.
Does that sound right? I thought there would be performance gains with the new SSD (in particular for the 1 TB).
I was hard-wired. But computer was plugged into my cable modem (Verizon FIOS). Would it have made a difference if I hard-wired my ethernet directly to the TC?Sounds right to me, since the restore is only as fast as the slowest link in the chain.
Your SSD may be fast (Read & Write speeds near 1 GBps), but the TC has a HD, not an SSD and you are transferring over WiFi. The maximum possible 802.11ac speed is 1.3 Gbps, which is 166 MBps (Gigabits vs. Megabytes). High end SATA HDs can sustain an average read speed of 150 MBps. In the real world, you are probably lucky to hit 50 MBps, and it depends on the number and type of files that are being accessed, plus other overhead.
400 GB @ 50 MBps with no other overhead would take 2.27 hours.
It's also not like you are restoring one big file, you are probably restoring hundreds of small files, which Time Machine has to get the latest version of from the backup, then transfer, then create/update.
I was hard-wired. But computer was plugged into my cable modem (Verizon FIOS). Would it have made a difference if I hard-wired my ethernet directly to the TC?
I was distracted -- and obviously wasn't thinking. I recently had Verizon send me their newest router (the "Red" - Gigabit one).It might have... I assume your cable modem only has 100 Mbps Ethernet on it, if that's the case you limited yourself to 12.5 MBps maximum... If you have an AirPort Time Capsule, I'm confused as to why you didn't plug directly into it...
If everything was Gigabit Ethernet, the limiting factor would still have been the Hard Drive the Time Machine backup was saved on.
If you introduced 100 Mbps Ethernet into the mix, the fastest you could have transferred 400 GB is 9.1 hours.