Fastest Copying?

Mac
#1

G’day,

I’m currently transferring around 2TB of data between 2 NAS drives. The drives themselves are technically wired together - via an Airport Extreme. However it would appear that whichever Mac I use (all wirelessly connected) becomes the slow-point, as the data appears to transfer from the first NAS, to the Mac, then to the second NAS.

This slows down the computer performing the copy, as well as the wireless network. I presme the OS is reading the file to RAM, then outputting it.

As such… which Mac should I tie up with the job? The one with the most RAM? Fastest CPU? Closest proximity (ie best wifi signal) to the Airport? Or does none of that matter?

Cheers

cosmic

#2

None of it matters, because it’s unlikely that your Mac hardware would be the limiting factor here. Instead, the bottleneck would most likely be the speed of your network connections, or the NAS or drives themselves, in that order.

#3

Hard wired beats wireless hands down…

#4

So, if I plug my MacbookPro into the Airport… err… if there’s another free spot… the copying should be much quicker?

#5

Absolutely !
60-90 Megabytes/sec can be sustained by hard wired using SMB3 protocol.
I can get only about 1 out of wireless. It is convenient but not fast for large data transfers. So I wire up to do weekly backups at home from my work machine.

Install the free Menumeters pref pane Cosmic (if you are on Yosemite or the 3rd party hacked v1.9 to beat SIP, if you are on El Capitan) and you can see the data throughput on your menubar. (iStat by Bjango is another paid option)

#6

Hard wired the MBP last night… Instead of being roughly 1Gb per hour… It was more like 10Gb per hour or more… :smile:

Think I figured out why my attempts to amalgamate my iPhoto libraries kept “freezing” - it was just taking a LONG time.

#7

Yeah, WiFi is great until you want to transfer large amounts of data.

I’m on wireless N from a Time Capsule and get about 15MB/s or so sitting in the same room. That can get up to 20MB/s sometimes depending on what else is doing what at the time. Moving to another room and putting a wall between the AP and it drops off very dramatically.

Plugging into that sweet sweet gigabit ethernet means I can transfer at 100MB/s to my NAS.

WiFi isn’t the only thing either, memory cards, USB sticks (or HDD’s) are great to store stuff on but suuuuuuuuck to drag lots of stuff off at once unless you have super speedy cards/devices AND connections. Those old USB2 memory sticks… well 20MB/s get’s you about a GB per minute so that 10GB movie still takes 10 minutes to transfer… have 64GB worth of stuff… yeah. (Assuming of course the stick itself is up to the task!).

#9

I love rsync. I have a couple of launchd scripts that rsync data between different machines in the early hours of the morning - data doesn’t exist unless it’s in more than one place!

#11

If the NAS has a direct USB connection then use that, then use ethernet hard wired with a patch cable, then if that doesn’t work, use wireless. It’s fastest to slowest in that order. You wont set land speed records because the drives in your NAS will likely be 5400rpm whatever but you should be able to get 150mb/s or about 15gb an hour in theory, but 10gb/hr seems more realistic.

These Ready NAS things aren’t the most speedy things in the world period, but it will do a job.