[chumeister]

I just bought a Lacie Ethernet 1TB drive to directly connect to my Powerbook G4 1.5Ghz 17". Connecting it directly via the CAT5 cable they included and setting a specific IP address for the device I only get transfer speeds of about 5-6 MB/sec. My old firewire 400 drive is about 3 times as fast. I was hoping to get 1000 MBs transfer speed. I have no other network devices.

Will getting a ethernet gigabit swtich ensure I get full transfer speed? If so why?

Or is there something else wrong?

I don't currently own a switch or a router. I thought connecting directly with a set IP address should sort it all out but hasn't.

[simonm]

If you're connecting to the router through an IP address that implies that the traffic is going through a network, which commonly have limits of 54M bit/s. If so, the most you'll get is the fastest that the router can handle. Eg 54 Mbit/s = 6.75 MByte/s...approximately the speeds you are quoting. Try connecting the drive directly to your gigabit ethernet port and you should see things speed up by an order of magnitude. If not, describe in more detail exactly what your setup is.

[chumeister]

I am currently connecting it directly to the drive from my powerbook. No other devices. Powerbook -> cat 5e cable -> ethernet port on the network drive. I have assigned a fixed IP address to the drive. A similar one on the computer with the same subnet of course. No other devices hooked up to the computer.

The network preferences on my computer is set to Gigabit ethernet at Full Duplex, with frame sizes of 1500 (the Powerbook doesn't support Jumbo frames).

All this still gives me 5-6 megabits per second transfer rate.

I've tried connecting via SMB & AFP. AFP seems a little faster than SMB. But still no where close to firewire 400 speeds.

ta.

[ghporter]

What are the specs for the drive itself? It's possible (maybe even likely) that your humongous drive is sorta slow. A lot of very large capacity drives are pretty darn slow, especially compared to what we're used to with 100GB or so ATA166 and SATA 150 drives.

[kamina]

I don't think it's a question of the drive, rather the logic circuits and processor in the box. Until now Lacie network drives have been pretty slow. The box contains a processor and probably runs some cut down version of Linux (or something similar). To save costs a lot of companies use pretty slow processors which can't handle the load of networking...

You didn't mention if it's reading or writing, usually writing is slower then reading. In the case of the Lacie it has software RAID 0 which might slow it down even a bit more.

Have a look at the performance charts here. The only Lacie I found in the review was the v2 of one of their networked drives, which managed writes at a bit higher speeds then you mentioned. Then again in the review it was said to be alot faster then the model it replaced.

[JamesBondo]

I was browsing looking for another topic, but this one caught my eye.

If the LaCie Drive is set up for autonegotiate (which it is, if you haven't changed it) and your macbook is set for full duplex, then the lacie drive thinks it is in half duplex mode.

This means that every time the drive is trying to send something, it listens, and then starts sending. Your macbook doesn't bother listening first, it just sends. Then the drive hears something on the network, gets a late collision, and starts over.

Shorter version - duplex mismatch bad. Matching duplex good.

Set your macbook to autonegotiate, or configure the LaCie to be full duplex also (but if you ever plug it into a switch, make sure that is full duplex also. Easier.... Set everything to autonegotiate. You will be happier.

-- JB