I've setup a USB drive as a share on my Airport extreme to use for backups. I noticed that doing this over Wifi was fairly slow (I have been using menuMeters to monitor network throughput as well watching the Peak display in Activity monitor under Network).
After a bit of research I found that many people suggest that the USB interface between the Airport base station and the drive would experience the lowest throughput assuming Wifi speeds were optimal. So I decided to see how fast this would work if directly wired to the base station and found that it was only slightly faster.
Over Wifi, I would get peak throughput of 1.5 - 3Mbps, when wired I get about 3.5 - 5Mbps. When doing this, I made sure no other clients are connected to the base station other than my MB Pro. I have also tried restarting both the MB Pro and Airport Extreme base station as well as using different ethernet cables with no difference.
It seems to me that I am experiencing latency on the connection to the base station if my wired connection is that slow. I will try testing it by ftp'ing to a share drive on another client and see what that gets me, but I'm curious if there are other ways I might be able to get LAN bandwidth statistics to better diagnose this as well as possible issues I should look into that might cause such slow speeds.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
After a bit of research I found that many people suggest that the USB interface between the Airport base station and the drive would experience the lowest throughput assuming Wifi speeds were optimal. So I decided to see how fast this would work if directly wired to the base station and found that it was only slightly faster.
Over Wifi, I would get peak throughput of 1.5 - 3Mbps, when wired I get about 3.5 - 5Mbps. When doing this, I made sure no other clients are connected to the base station other than my MB Pro. I have also tried restarting both the MB Pro and Airport Extreme base station as well as using different ethernet cables with no difference.
It seems to me that I am experiencing latency on the connection to the base station if my wired connection is that slow. I will try testing it by ftp'ing to a share drive on another client and see what that gets me, but I'm curious if there are other ways I might be able to get LAN bandwidth statistics to better diagnose this as well as possible issues I should look into that might cause such slow speeds.
Thanks in advance for any feedback.