[darcybaston]

You guys ever notice how duplicating a 500mb file takes longer than it does to copy it to an SMB windows shared computer on an ethernet network? The megabytes just fly by whereas copying a file from one folder to another, you get to watch the progress slowly progress in 500k jumps.

Is it because the network copy is a direct reading burst, and the file duplication causes the hard drive to multitask so much that performance just dies?

I never experienced this on iMac DV SE 400Mhz. I guess this is part of the inherent lag in iBook laptop life? (933MHZ G4 14")

[ccsccs7]

Hmm, well, the iBook does have a slower drive than any recent desktop. reading and then writing back to the drive would at least cut its speed in half (and if I recall correctly, it takes slightly longer to write than it does to read). I suppose this would suggest that the iBook's drive is somewhere around as fast as the network connection for the network to be noticeably faster when doing a copy.

This chart shows a number of benchmarks, including a 400 MHz iMac and 366 MHz iBook. We can see that the two portable drives are only a bit over half as fast as the desktops'.