Network Bandwidth / Speed Question (Wireless N / External HDD)

[BlueSkyBlueWind]

Hi all,

I have both Macbook Pro and MacMini (and a couple of PCs).

MacMini has multiple external HDDs attached to it, and it is serving as our home server. Since the server needs to be accessed by both Mac and PCs, I've set up the sharing through SMB.

Recently, I bought LinkSys Dualband N Router (320N), and was hoping to get the maximum transfer speed, but it's not so easy to archive around 12-13MB/s speed over my home network.

Scenario 1 (MBP - Wireless N / MacMini - Gigabit Ethernet)
Data on MacMini's external HDD: max 5-6MB/s (bad)
Data on MacMini's own HDD: max 13MB/s (very good)

Scenario 2 (MBP - Wireless N / MacMini - also on Wireless N)
Data on MacMini's external HDD: max 2.5MB/s (extremely bad)
Data on MacMini's own HDD: max 5MB/s (bad)

Question 1: what can I do to pull 13MB/s from MacMini's external HDDs? They are connected via USB 2.0 or Firewire, so the connection itself shouldn't be a problem.

Question 2: why is it that when both are on the same wireless N (5Ghz) the speed decreases by 3 folds? When I look at the network monitor, MBP is at 300Mbps and MacMini is at 270Mbps.

Can anybody help me with these? I searched all over but couldn't find any solution that I was looking for.

 

[iLog.Genius]

First, going through ethernet is always the best option (if possible) because it eliminates any interference that could be had with Wireless and will give the best transfer speeds. I don't know what your HDD specs are but never expect theoretical speeds there is always some sort of bottleneck. In this case your external HDD's are using USB which is the bottleneck. Again I don't know the specs but getting those numbers is pretty normal to me.

 

[BlueSkyBlueWind]

Thanks for chiming in.

I don't quite remember the exact spec, but copying from the external to internal HDD is well above 10-15MB/s, so I don't think the HDD itself is the problem.

Any other thought?