High speed data transfer between MBP (2015) and Time Capsule with Thunderbolt/Gigabit ethernet cable.

1,000 Mbps is a theoretical "link-speed" over Ethernet cable. The actual throughput of data will usually be about half of the link speed.

The actual speed of data transfer over Ethernet is about 450-500 Mbps, or about 1 GB per minute. So, a 60 GB file would transfer in approximately 60 minutes.

1,000 Megabits = approximately 1 Gigabit per second or 1 Gbps

Gigabit Ethernet = approximately 1,000 Megabits per second

Örjan Lennström wrote:

Got the transfer rate Airport Time Caspule --> Ethernet --> Thunderbolt --> MacBook Pro to 40GB/15Min.

What you will find is large files transfer very fast.. small files are much slower due to the issue of copy speed on actual hard disk.. unless your MBP has SSD I would expect as bob said average speed of around 1GB/min. so around 60GB/hr.. but much faster if the files are very large.. and faster reading from the TC and writing to SSD.

Here is copying the file to my NAS.. actually over wireless.. which has link speed of 450mbps but actual transfer is much less than link, usually half. Although 27MB/s is very good speed (Byte = 8bits) so peak 227Mbps so almost dead on half the link speed.

Here is copying the same file from NAS back to the computer using ethernet.. computer has SSD..

As you can see it was so fast it had finished before I could snap the screenshot.

Peak speed 117.1MB/s = 936Mbps so very close to the 1000Mbps limit.. due to speed of the disks.. and the NAS is synology and using a fast 7200rpm drive unlike the TC 5400rpm slow drive.

I realize I'm late to this conversation, but there are some notable cable improvements since Category 5 that could help your issues quite a bit. Cat 5e performed a bit better, but Cat 6 cables and now Cat 6a cables claim to be capable of much higher transfer rates. As LaPastenague pointed out, there are 8 bits in a byte. But you still have a reason to be unhappy with your transfer rate. Yes, the term Mbs/s is NOT megabytes per second, it is megaBITS per second. That means 1,000 megabits per second equals 125 megabytes per second, even though it's apparently not really achievable. Still, that equates to 450 gigabytes per hour, as opposed to your 64. If the actual throughput were only half of the max, then that is still 225 gigabytes per hour, and one third speed would still be 150 gigabytes per hour. Even making sure both of my computers are set to 1,000 Mbs/s, a transfer of one terabyte takes over nine hours with a Cat 6 cable. That's about 30 megabytes per second, or 240 megabits per second... only a fourth of the 1,000. I realize my connection is nearly twice as fast as yours, but we both have a reason to question why it's performing so much slower than it should.

You cannot exceed the rate determining step in a process.. in the case of file transfer if you test memory to memory you will get extremely close to the max wire speed of gigabit.. but real world hard disks are not that fast.. and transferring lots of small files is much slower.

The TC is processor bound.. if I do a test copying file over gigabit to a Time Capsule and use exactly the same hard disk in a computer.. the computer will go a lot faster.. you are simply reaching the peak speeds of the processor and hard disk controller combo.

Even replacing the disk with SSD in a TC would not help because it is still a slow interface.

If you transfer files between two computers using SSD you will reach very close to peak line speed.

It should start moving up to 10Gbps ethernet before long.. once we get past mechanical drives.. and fast infrastructure is of course already using 10Gbps copper or fibre connections.