Transfer Rate Between PC & Mac

[lxylxy748]

Hi all,

I am been confused for a week about the transfer rate on local area network through wifi.

I downloaded plenty of videos from the internet on my PC and I would like to transfer these videos to my Mac. At the beginning, I use thumb drive to copy the videos and paste it on Mac. (The thumb drive was a homemade one which has the capacity of 8G with 3mb/sec writing speed). However, the quantity of videos are pretty large, I started to consider to use Hard Drive (500GB WD Hard Drive with 30+mb/sec writing speed with USB 2.0). I tried to use this to transfer videos but the application that allow the PC read Mac disk need to pay for registration. Hence, I need to find another way to solve this problem. Then I started to think how about the LAN via wireless network and I do have a wireless router. Connecting these two machines are not really easy, especially for PC and a Mac. Finally, I successfully connect two machines through the router. The transfer rate is terrible which is only 1.5mb/sec at max. speed.

Here is the model of all my machines hopefully it does help a little.

MacBook Pro 15-inch, Mid 2010, Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Dell XPS M1330

D-link DIR-655


Q01: Why the transfer rate only remains at 1.5mb/sec, because even the download speed can achieve about 7mb/sec. I use SMB for file sharing.

Q02: I select serval folds to share but when I use my PC to access the Mac, it able to access entire Mac disk even the external hard disk. Why?

 

[whooleytoo]

In my experience, copying files locally across Wifi rarely works well - since both machines are using Wifi you presumably are halving the available bandwidth straight away. I don't think the AFP or SMB protocols are particularly efficient over Wifi either.

In my local testing, I was able to get 22Mbps when copying between two machines (802.11 N Wifi, with 40MHz mode on, so 300Mbps link speed).

When I connected one of the machines to the router via a Powerline adaptor, I got over 30Mbps.

When I connected both via Powerline, I saw speeds of up to 86Mbps.

 

[ezramoore]

Why not format the external disk on your PC using NTFS (which the Mac can read, but cannot natively write).

Then you could copy the movies to the disk from the PC and copy them off the disk on the Mac. No need to purchase a program that allows you to use HFS+ on the PC at all.

Q02: I select serval folds to share but when I use my PC to access the Mac, it able to access entire Mac disk even the external hard disk. Why?

As to this, by default OS X ignores permissions on external volumes (which, fun fact, include any non-system drives that are mounted).

 

[lxylxy748]

Why not format the external disk on your PC using NTFS (which the Mac can read, but cannot natively write).

Then you could copy the movies to the disk from the PC and copy them off the disk on the Mac. No need to purchase a program that allows you to use HFS+ on the PC at all.



As to this, by default OS X ignores permissions on external volumes (which, fun fact, include any non-system drives that are mounted).

The hard disk is almost full, and It is really annoying by transfer all 400GB+ data through USB 2.0 which will takes few hours. XD

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In my experience, copying files locally across Wifi rarely works well - since both machines are using Wifi you presumably are halving the available bandwidth straight away. I don't think the AFP or SMB protocols are particularly efficient over Wifi either.

In my local testing, I was able to get 22Mbps when copying between two machines (802.11 N Wifi, with 40MHz mode on, so 300Mbps link speed).

When I connected one of the machines to the router via a Powerline adaptor, I got over 30Mbps.

When I connected both via Powerline, I saw speeds of up to 86Mbps.

Thanks for your explanation and testing that are really helpful for me.

I have not try the Apple Time Capsule, that might have a really high speed for transfering data either between two Macs or PCs.

And it might be the reason they use it for Time Machine (High speed transfer rate)

Thanks again for your kindly reply.