Monday August 20th 2007, 10:42 pm 
By Dale Mugford
Tags: Airport, Apple, internet networking, wireless
Even on an 802.11g network you can achieve some pretty fast transfers between your Macs & PC’s, provided one detail: one of the computers you’ll be transferring to or from is hard-wired via Ethernet.
Every wireless network has a threshold of bandwidth available on it which is somewhat in flux, due to the distances the connections are made at; the variety of devices on a network and their respective transfer speeds; and the amount of traffic on the network at the time you make a transfer.
Making a transfer of a 1.18GB video file from my Core2Duo Macbook wirelessly to an Ethernet wired Core2Duo iMac through my 802.11n Airport Extreme, I achieve wireless speeds of around 11.3Mb/sec. In terms of time, that 1.18GB video file took less than a minute to complete.
Making the same transfer with both computers wirelessly connected to the Airport Extreme, the transfer speeds were more than sliced in half. Why?
It may seem obvious to some, but the reason why the speeds are sliced in half for the two computers on the same 802.11n network with no other congestion, connected less than 20 feet from the base station- is simple: There’s a two-way connection happening on both computers, splitting the wireless bandwidth in half, and then some.
The router communicates with the iMac and vice versa, and to and from the MacBook simultaneously.
In order to significantly speed things up, I’ve hard-wired the iMac with Ethernet, and achieve the higher speeds for file transfers both coming from the iMac to other computers, and to the iMac from my wireless Macs.
Forget AirDisk
The above method also beats Apple’s AirDisk solution as well. Wireless transfers to an AirDisk give, at best, around 380Mb/sec transfer speeds for me. The bottleneck is USB itself, with a limitation of around 400 Mb, which is, in real-world transfers, often slower. Connecting an external hard drive to your Ethernet wired Mac and mounting it in the Finder will yield faster network transfers using backup utilities or applications over the network.
Music and movies both play flawlessly using the one-way method. Having an external, wireless iTunes library is very feasible on an 802.11n one-way wireless network, such as I have setup.
And if you’re looking for an extremely simple and configurable solution for quickly sending files between Macs, use the donation-ware networking tool from 10base-T interactive, DropCopy.
DropCopy places a small, translucent circle on your desktop which, when dragging a file to it, will reveal the other computers via Bonjour on your network, allowing you to send files directly without having to first mount their drives on your computer.
The only caveat is that you must have DropCopy installed on all the Macs you want to send files to or from on your network. The website offers step-by-step instructions to setup everything easily and quickly, including how to open ports on each Mac’s firewall, and your router’s firewall.
If you’re looking to beef-up the speed of your wireless network, consider this one-way solution. Whether it’s large files, wireless backup, or just less congestion overall on your wireless network, hard-wiring a Mac that is going to bear the brunt of heavy traffic is the way to go.
August 21st, 2007 at 1:25 am
Nice tip, but sometimes I just want to have an AirDisk connected. In this cases speed doesn’t matter, but comfort. I don’t want to have a computer on by default for 24h and the AirDisk is a better solution in this case, because it gets automatically turned of if not used.
August 29th, 2007 at 5:52 pm
I have a macbook and when I transfer files, using 802.11n, to a wired ppc mac mini, the best rate I can get is just under 2Mbyte/s or ~15Mbit/s. A 1GB file takes far longer than 1min to transfer… I’d love to know what the difference in our setups.
September 6th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
[...] connected to the Airport Extreme, the transfer speeds were more than sliced in half. Why? (more…) « How Do I Network My Mac and PC? » How Do I Make a Program Start-up At a [...]
October 9th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
[...] connected to the Airport Extreme, the transfer speeds were more than sliced in half. Why? (more…) « Handbrake has been [...]
September 23rd, 2008 at 7:46 am
sample money loan contract…
sticker:clinical trickle Xebec stunt?factions …
October 4th, 2008 at 3:42 am
individual group health insurance…
handfuls diminishing,capitalizer …
October 4th, 2008 at 11:25 am
health insurance companies with good rates…
belches Venezuelan intellect …
October 18th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
average cost of homeowners insurance…
began cloth ledges brim …
October 25th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
poker nolimittexasholdempoker…
Normanizations,telegraphers,maniacs monochrome:homeomorphism steak …