What is your wired ethernet connection speed during Time Machine backup

Question

Level 1

125 points

What is your wired ethernet connection speed during Time Machine backup

I am curious as to what transfer speeds everyone is getting with a wired ethernet connection. The problem I have is I am trying to use Time Capsule as my Time Machine storage. However, even with a Cat6 cable my average transfer rate is between 250 and 300kb/s. Once in a while that rate rockets up to 16mb/s but that burst only lasts a few seconds. At this rate I am backing up about 1GB an hour. This is going to take me 7 days just to do my initial backup which is nuts. Something has to be wrong with this thing. It just can't seem to sustain a decent transfer speed.

2.5GHz-15.4" MacBook Pro, 4GB ram, 512MB vid, 250GBHDD, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Mar 7, 2008 11:52 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Mar 7, 2008 2:03 PM in response to adrenalin

I had the same issue with speed and it was rescued by inactivating anti-virus software.

Reply

Answer 2

adrenalin Author

Level 1

125 points

Mar 7, 2008 4:01 PM in response to hypomorph

I had Norton installed on my machine but uninstalled it prior to getting the TC. I just spent 3 hours on the phone with AppleCare support. Looks like they are sending me a replacement unit.

Reply

Answer 3

Mar 9, 2008 6:52 AM in response to adrenalin

I backed up two machines over ethernet 118GB and 95GB respectively and saw about 10GB per hour speeds.

Reply

Answer 4

Mar 9, 2008 8:02 AM in response to adrenalin

When connected by ethernet to my iMac, I checked the transfer speed to the TC several times by moving a 1GB file and it only took a little over a minute. The 1 GB per minute speed also was consistent with the time it took to backup of my iMac harddrive to the TC over ethernet. Don't know how to explain this difference from those experiencing much slower transfer rates. Could it be that when you are connected by ethernet your airport connection is still active and the transfer of data is taking place over the wireless connection instead?? Moving data between the TC and a connected USB drive, however, is very slow for me.

Reply

Answer 5

John Strung

Level 6

13,440 points

Mar 9, 2008 1:13 PM in response to Tad Blank

I backed up 80 gigs in about 5 hours using a CAT 5e ethernet cable. Just remember you need at least a CAT5e cable and preferably a CAT6 cable to get Gigabit ethernet speeds. Plain CAT5 is not good enough.

Reply