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rotuts · Nov 25, 2005, 12:15 PM

I home to get a G5quad in Jan. I ahve two G4duals 2ghz, with ata drives

how fast will large files transfer using the ethernet connection between these machines? it doesn't tell me the ethernet speed on the about this mac.

would things go faster if I got a firewire 800 card for the g4 and connected that way?

thaks

rotuts

sray · Nov 25, 2005, 01:25 PM

G4duals 2ghz ?

Are you referring to G4 MDD (1 Ghz) ? If so, that has gigabit ethernet. Your new quad has TWO gigabit ethernet jacks. Bottom line, you can use a gigabit switch to connect them all together.

In theory, you should be able to transfer data at 1 gigabit, which is (again in theory) faster than Firewire 800. However, I have never seen any tests to prove which is really faster in reality.

I have a similar situation: a MDD G4 and a G5 quad. They are connected via a netgear gigabit switch. The MDD is the print server running a RIP to an Epson 4000. Certainly, very very fast in transfering a print job from the G5 to the G4.

Kristoff · Nov 25, 2005, 03:19 PM

I have a DP 800 G4, and a DP 2.0 G5 in different rooms.

I use a Netgear GS105 Gigabit switch in the loft, and a DLink DGL-4100 Gigabit switch/router combo in the telco panel to interconnect the rooms in the house.

While there is no Jumbo frame support with any of this hardware, I can tell you that copying files from one machine to the other over the gigabit network is pretty damned fast.

I just did a test for you...now mind you this is through two switches and between floors:

98383679 bytes sent in 00:05 (16.67 MB/s)

The files was MacOSXUpdate10.4.3.dmg which is 93.8 MB on disk (98,383,679 bytes) according to the finder.

So, it took 5 seconds to transfer about 100 megs.

nerd · Nov 25, 2005, 05:46 PM

I used to have a Dual 533 G4 (now sold) hooked up to my G5 Dual 2.0 with a Netgear GS105. If the G4 was on a fresh reboot I would get a bout 39MB/sec. After a while it would slow about about 27MB/sec. This was copying to a mirror RAID that was mirrored with an ACARD hardware raid card.

The drives were always the limit for me I assume. Wouldn't that explain why the speed would drop after a while, like the RAM had filled up on the G4???

Oh yea, these speeds monitored using MenuMeters.

mduell · Nov 26, 2005, 01:47 AM

All your PowerMacs should have gigabit ethernet, so ethernet should be faster than Firewire (assuming OSX's TCP/IP stack doesn't suck).

Kristoff · Nov 26, 2005, 10:29 AM

Originally Posted by mduell

(assuming OSX's TCP/IP stack doesn't suck).

Dude.....do you realize what you just said?

BSD anyone?

mindwaves · Nov 26, 2005, 12:05 PM

I get about 38MB/sec when transferring a large file over my gigabit ethernet connection between my iMac 1.9GHz and dual 867 G4 both with gigabit ethernet.

rotuts · Nov 26, 2005, 12:23 PM

thaks for all the great ideas

are these fast transfer speed from a G4dual ( mine is the 2gz mirror) ATA/100 drive? itsnt that the slowest part of the transfer pipe?

therefore how do you get a faster transfer from HD to HD vs a firefire 400 connecfion to a ATA/100 drive in an external box?

anyway Ill be back wthen I get the G5 DD ( also known as the Quad)

cheers

rotut

mduell · Nov 26, 2005, 01:16 PM

Originally Posted by Kristoff

Dude.....do you realize what you just said?

BSD anyone?

Some BSD "flavors" have very good TCP/IP stacks. OSX uses the userland from FreeBSD, but they could very well have written their own TCP/IP stack, or used an older one from NeXT/Mach. Apple could have compromised the TCP/IP speed for other reasons (as they did with threading performance).

Originally Posted by rotuts

are these fast transfer speed from a G4dual ( mine is the 2gz mirror) ATA/100 drive? itsnt that the slowest part of the transfer pipe?

therefore how do you get a faster transfer from HD to HD vs a firefire 400 connecfion to a ATA/100 drive in an external box?

anyway Ill be back wthen I get the G5 DD ( also known as the Quad)

Internal hard drive to internal hard drive transfers are limited by the speed of the drive (usually 50-70MBps) or the bus (100-133MBps) if you have two drives on the same cable. Firewire is only 50MBps, gigabit ethernet is 125MBps.

rotuts · Nov 26, 2005, 03:00 PM

md:

thanks but Im feeling very duncey today. by what mechanism do you get such faster tx rates via ethernet as doesn't the data have to get off the HData100/133G4 to the ethernet? isn't this the slowest step?

thanks rotut

CatOne · Nov 26, 2005, 03:09 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

All your PowerMacs should have gigabit ethernet, so ethernet should be faster than Firewire (assuming OSX's TCP/IP stack doesn't suck).

No way. The drives will limit performance in both cases, though I'd probably expect FW800 to be a bit faster, just due to efficiency.

power142 · Nov 26, 2005, 03:24 PM

I often see transfers of > 50MB/sec from my G5 (single disk) to G4 (OSX mirrored disk), with peaks topping 60MB/sec when synchronizing or copying data between them. This is what I'd hope for from the disks I have in them. I haven't seen a hard disk yet that can sustain transfers at close to 1Gbit speeds, so the read/write speeds of the disks in each machine is going to be a limiting factor. (Background: the Atlas from Maxtor claims 98MB/sec and the Cheetah from Seagate claims 96MB/sec, both are 15000-rpm SCSI drives)

mduell · Nov 26, 2005, 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by rotuts

thanks but Im feeling very duncey today. by what mechanism do you get such faster tx rates via ethernet as doesn't the data have to get off the HData100/133G4 to the ethernet? isn't this the slowest step?

Do you have Firewire 400 or 800? Would you be copying from more than one disk?

Originally Posted by CatOne

No way. The drives will limit performance in both cases, though I'd probably expect FW800 to be a bit faster, just due to efficiency.

Does he have FW800? I was guessing he upgraded an older pre-FW800 G4 to 2Ghz. Also, Apple's implmentation of Firewire isn't terribly efficient.