[andymcdeee]

I just bought a gigabit switch for me macs (linky) and when copying large (2 gig or so) files between them it kills the G4. It'll start copying - extremely quickly I might add - then it'll just hang. Different files, different hard drives. Clean OS on both (10.3.8 on the G4, 10.3.4 on the G5). It never hangs the G5 - except for that twilight zone between losing the G4 and it actually telling me so.

The cables are all in good nick. All Cat 5e which I think is right.

Any help would be great, hope I haven't bought a lemon

Cheers
-Andy

[ghporter]

How long does it hang, or is the G4 locked up when it fails? It's possible that the G4 can't handle the traffic as quickly as the G5 can send it (gigabit is pretty darn fast!), so it's either slowing it down so it can do something with what it's already received, or it's chokeing because of the extreme speed of the file transfer.

I think the PowerMac G4's NIC is still a PCI device, and the PCI bus is not really up to handling straight file transfers at gigabit speeds.

You're right that Cat5e is the way to go, and having checked your cables, you've properly narrowed it down to the two computers. Have you tried transfering the same size file from the G4 to the G5? I'll bet it goes just fine, and that would pretty much diagnose that my theory is close, if not exactly right.

[andymcdeee]

Thanks for your reply Glenn.

The G4 is completely locked up and doesn't recover ie. needs a restart. As you point out, It may simply be too quick for it. Unfortunately, this freeze happens both ways (from G4 to G5 as well). The G4 is a MDD Dual 1 Ghz. Both drives I'm copying to are on the ATA 100 bus and can hangle up to 50MB's a sec but I think the network might be quicker than that. (jeepers!)

Any way I can slow it down? (I'd hate to have to do this... ) I tried looking for apps on version tracker but the jargon beat me in the end.

Cheers
-Andy

[bstone]

What protocol are you using for the copy? Have you tried SMB, SFTP, even SCP? Give those a shot and see how it works. I'm curious to see if it's protocol specific.

[andymcdeee]

oooooh, I think you've flown over my head with those terms. SMB, SFTP and SCP are things I have never heard of sorry. I'm just selecting the drive in the network pane, loading it on the desktop and draggin files across. Sounds like there's a better way?