[reemas]

im using a cat 6 cable and two new powerbooks. when i start fiel sharing and try sharing files, i get extremely slow speeds over the cable.

how do i take advantage of the gigabit ethernet??

thanks.

[MrForgetable]

maybe firewire target disk mode would be faster?

[euphras]

maybe firewire target disk mode would be faster?

That´s not the answer for his question! He wants to network the two machines. And: Gbit Ethernet is faster...(well, in theory)


Reemas, have you checked the actual connection speed that´s displayed in the network utility application, does it read 1000 MBit/s?

[MrForgetable]

Originally posted by euphras:
That´s not the answer for his question! He wants to network the two machines. And: Gbit Ethernet is faster...(well, in theory)


Reemas, have you checked the actual connection speed that´s displayed in the network utility application, does it read 1000 MBit/s?

that is kind of what i meant. if gigabit ethernet isn't that fast, maybe firewire would?

[reemas]

it takes me about 10 seconds to send a 3.5 megabyte song file from one notebook to another. that just seems a little slow for gigabit ethernet to me.

im not sure how i cna test the speeds, any ideas?

ill try the network utility when my friend comes over again, but is there any way to set it to gigabit in case it automatically decides to use 100 mbs instead of 1000?

[macaddict0001]

should be a wee bit faster.

[Evinyatar]

You should check the cable. I often have the same problem transferring between my PowerBook and my PC, where forcing the connection at 100mbit actually results in a huge speed increase.

[reemas]

did you mean force 100 or 1000?

and how would you force or select a speed?

[euphras]

IIRC you cannot select the speed. The machine always selects automatically the highest speed, at which no packet loss occurs, if you connect two machines with GBit Ethernet ports with the appropriate cable, 1000 MBit/s should be activated.

[elbles]

Something to keep in mind; even assuming that Gigabit Ethernet could transfer data at wire speeds (normally, you'll get maybe 600-800 megabits/second on average, using Gigabit Ethernet), it corrolates to 125 megabytes/second. 125 megabytes per second is quite fast, obviously, and a PowerBook doesn't exactly have the fastest hard drive in the world, for reasons of power and size; I'm not saying they are slow or anything, but it should just be understood that it is pretty hard to saturate a gigabit ethernet connection, simply because hard drives have a hard time of keeping on on a sustained basis.

[reemas]

yeah. i was getting horrible speeds. like it said it takes just over 10 seconds for a 3.5 megabyte mp3 file.

i was using a cat 6 cable, is that correct?

[elbles]

Yeah, a Cat6 cable should easily support Gigabit Ethernet; what method are you using to transfer the file? From what I've heard, using native Apple File Sharing will give you the best transfer speeds, followed by NFS, and then SMB file sharing services. Whichever one you are trying, I'd recommend trying another one of the methods too, to isolate where the problem is; if they are all equally slow, you know the problem lays on one or both of the PowerBooks at a level lower than that of the file sharing services. Hope that helps you out a bit . . .

[Thinine]

To manually set the speed: System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet -> Ethernet tab -> change popup menu to manual -> set desired speed in the popup menu that appears.

[reemas]

i was using afp. i think thats apples fileshare mode.

i'll try other modes and get back to you. but i wont see my friend for a week. something was definately wrong and i thought we followed directions properly. thanks all.

[thetman]

kinda on topic here but from what i understand cat5e can handle gigabit ethernet, what does cat6 offer in advantage

[anamexis]

Originally posted by thetman:
kinda on topic here but from what i understand cat5e can handle gigabit ethernet, what does cat6 offer in advantage

Not much in terms of short file transfers like this, but the main ones are longer range (550m or 1000m rather than the 350m limit of Cat5e), higher quality wire (23 gauge rather than the 24 gauge Cat5e), and finally, higher resitence to crosstalk andn noise.

[gioele]

Probably the other ethernet card don't understand the 1Gb handshake, so set himself to 10Mb. Your PB do the same and you end in a 10Mb connection

If the other card is gigabit-able manually set it to 1Gb, otherwise manually set it to 100Mb. The PB will do the rest.

[bighead]

According to Net Monitor, I get about 200-250 Mbits/sec. sustained between my PowerBook and my G4 server. That's through a D-Link gigabit switch and Cat5 connecting it all together (I know you should technically have "e" for gigabit, but it is able to make the link, so I'm guessing the short 15" run of the cable from the server to the switch helps where cable type leaves off.)

Can't say for sure what's up with the slow speeds, except to check the cable, make sure that BOTH machines are capable of gigabit speeds, and that there's nothing else set up to use the network. I've had times where the autonegotiation between a gigabit unit and the not-autonegotiating 100Mbit NICs defaults to 10Mbits as a previous poster mentioned and it took some easy but often overlooked steps to fix.

[mhuie]

Might be a stupid question but are you using a crossover cable? Or are you going through a 1000bt switch/hub? Static IP?

[anamexis]

Originally posted by mhuie:
Might be a stupid question but are you using a crossover cable? Or are you going through a 1000bt switch/hub? Static IP?

In response to that first question, you don't need a crossover in Cat6 i believe, and besides, the Powerbook has automatic software crossover emulation.

[zed57]

Originally posted by anamexis:
In response to that first question, you don't need a crossover in Cat6 i believe, and besides, the Powerbook has automatic software crossover emulation.

that is cool