Time Capsule backup speed crippled?

[ajthomason]

I now have a 1TB Time Capsule sitting on my desk. It is plugged into my MPB using a Cat5e cable, and both the laptop and TC are capable of a Gigabit connection...

Can anyone tell me why, when I tell time machine to do a backup (in this case, the first backup), iStat Menus tells me that it is backing up at about 500KB/s? To test my theory and prove that my TC is not useless, I decided to copy a 4GB file manually to the TC's hard drive - that one was happy to copy at 12MB/s!

Can someone please tell me why I have to wait for 2 days for a 100GB drive to backup when a 4GB file will copy in 5 mins. I am not doing anything else on the network, it just seems clear that Apple have crippled the TCs speed, even over ethernet... What on earth is the point?!

 

[splott]

I'm right in the middle (correction: right at the beginning) of a first backup right now on a 1TB Time Capsule. I'm wishing I'd found your post beforehand and connected via ethernet rather than wirelessly, though I don't know as it would make much difference. According to iStat, the upload speed is jumping around anywhere between 1KB/s and 1.5MB/s. 2 days to backup 100GB? Sh*t. I've got 260GB to backup. So far it's been going 2 and a half hours and has only managed 6GB. This is ludicrous. What gives?

 

[ajthomason]

I was connected by ethernet, it eventually picked up after an hour or so and made it to 8MB/s, so just give it a while (and don't use it too much!)

 

[alphaod]

Time Capsule is slow and has always been. That is normal speeds for a TC.

 

[splott]

Well 21 hours on and it's backed up almost 90GB. Only another 170 to go ...

I discovered another thread on the subject -- https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/379066/ -- so checked out Console. Little Snitch was interfering, so stopped it. Also turned off Spotlight for the external Firewire 800 HDD. After making no discernible difference for a few hours after, it's now picked up a little and is averaging about 2 to 2.5MB/s.

If I'd used Superduper to clone the two drives it would have been done in 3 hours or so. Time Machine had better be worth it after all this. Is it?