Q: Why does copying to my Time Capsule internal drive stall?

Or am I complicating things by having both a wired gigabit connection AND an Airport N connection live at the same time?  That is, I have Airport turned on for both my Minis, connected to the Airport Time Capsule, AND I have ethernet cables connecting both my Minis to the gigabit ports of the ATC.  Is this not only redundant (which I wouldn't mind) but counter-productive/causing the stall?

Dual paths are not redundant.. they mess things up.. simply turn off the wireless.

If you are copying a single large file the whole copy should proceed at full speed.. if the copy includes lots of little files it will slow down considerably.. TC is not efficient way for storing small files.. and over network there is a lot of time spent dealing with the file allocation etc.

Do a test with a single file of say 3GB and see what happens.

I.e., isn't an ATC smart enough to use the fastest available connection method without stepping on its own toes?  Isn't Mac OS X smart enough to prevent that too?

It should.. you put the ethernet to the top of the order in the network area.

Just use the bottom icon and set the order.

But my experience is that having both wireless and ethernet working to the same location even with the order correct still causes issues.

(You see I have wireless and ethernet active and in the right order.. but the wireless is to access my bridged modem and has no effect on speed to the TC, it is a different IP range.)

TM works better than just straight copying a lot of small files.. but it can still be slow in the middle of a backup as a lot of system files are small.

Ok.. you have another different bug in effect.. that is the TC and Mountain Lion have no love for each other.

For the disk to spin down during a backup or file copy something is badly severely wrong.

You have no control of the TC disk spin down.. heck you have almost no control of the TC period. Apple cut out what little controls were available in earlier firmware and airport utility.

But I would ensure that there is never path confusion.. even having the wireless connect leaves a setting in the arp table on the computer.

I would setup the TC all over from factory.

Make sure all names are short (2-20 characters), no spaces and pure alphanumeric.

Unfortunately that is also required on the computer.

The TC can have some issues if it is in bridge. Exactly how do you have it setup in the network??

Do the test with a single large file.. if it stalls, ensure other computers are not using the TC at the same time.. and also test from a second computer. See if it stalls..

Tell us how you do.

BTW do you have ipv6 turned on and set to local link for the ethernet port on the computer.

This is now a requirement at least for the setup and may well help the computer keep track of the TC.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4597

The name issue is not files.. it is the network names.

Check out this one for more info.

http://pondini.org/TM/C9.html

Although Pondini is more concerned about Time Machine .. the network bugs also affect that.

Apple have used those strange names since forever but they are not doing it any favours.

I have to admit I come out of the "Rest of the World" network and to me all names should be short as possible.. certainly no spaces.. and absolutely no apostrophe or special characters. Since you are having these issues.. conforming to the fundamentals of networking is a good idea.

I'm running DHCP with Manual addresses

I would not do that.. If you want fixed IP use the dhcp reservation in the TC.

If I can't iron out the problem, should I consider this a potential warranty issue?  I.e., if the behavior has been "badly severely wrong" since I set it up to begin with, might I be aiming toward trying to exchange the product?

Sure.. I would indeed have rung apple support since yesterday. It is their problem.. you have brand new equipment which doesn't work to spec.. and you have bought from single source supplier to ensure you would not have to do this kind of windows world junk. You have every right to be upset. Premium products should "just work" .. but this new TC is a big change for apple.. it is the first new .. in the sense of whole product change since TC was introduced.. it is like going from powerpc to intel. which is infact what they have done.. they are rewriting the firmware to match the old TC for a completely different processor. The issues will be fixed up in a couple of hardware revisions and about 5 firmware updates.. I am sure. Whether your one will be.. I don't know.

Hi.. thanks for reporting back.. it helps me to know which of the config changes are important.. I would not have thought ipv6 vital to anything other than the initial setup. Even I am surprised it needs to be turned on to get good file transfer speed.. Tell us please if it suddenly changes again but excellent result.