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circatee

Contributor
Original poster
Nov 30, 2014
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Where I am
Not sure if this is the correct place for this post, but...

I have an iMac (late 2015, i5, 16GB memory, and a 2TB fusion drive), and a Windows 10 computer.
Both units have a gigabit NIC.

When transferring data between the two, the highest speed I notice is around 850-860 MBs.
Shouldn't I get more than that?

Thanks in advance
 
The speeds you're getting are absolutely fine. Gigabit is up to 1000Mb/s, but as with any connection, you're never ever going to 100% saturate it. There are so many different factors as well — the size of the files you're transferring, the number of files, the cable, the speed of the computer(s), the OS/driver version, background networking tasks...

850Mb/s isn't bad at all; I'd take it. I'd probably be concerned if it was consistently transferring far below 70MB/s. If you're looking to speed it up, it'll take a lot of effort and troubleshooting for very little reward (2MB/s extra here, 2MB/s there...)
 
...good point. Same situation with a hard drive. You never get the true drive size for full use.
Maybe during the transfers I was doing, prior to even testing the gigabit speeds, etc., the data was 'rough', and thus causing the transfer to be much slower (in the 200-300 MB/s).

Thanks for the input.
 
Those speeds are normal, You'll probably not get anything faster due to the overhead. You could mess with the packet size, set up a high speed switch, go to fiber, etc, etc but in the end, you're facing diminishing returns.
 
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