Any way to speed up LAN file transfer with Airport?

T

tonbo

Registered
I have my G4 733 and my new iMac 1G (with installed Airport Extreme card) networked with the original Airport Base Station.

Silly me, I'm trying to transfer a DVD file (4.2G) between the two--and I'm getting "Estimated time left: 25 hours" !!!!!!

Is there ANYTHING I can do to speed this up, not counting going out and buying an Extreme Base Station?
 
Try not to use AFP shares - it is a very slow protocol. I have SSH and SMB running over airport and I find either of them quicker. FTP is quicker as well. If you do a search on this site there are threads discussing setting up SMB and SSH. If anybody has any faster protocols then I would be interested. I know on NT you can change the underlying protocol from TCP to UDP, which makes a bit of a difference on good quality networks - not sure if the same is possible on OSX, and I am not sure that it is a good idea over airport as you really need a good quality connection.

Are you regularly going to be copying files of that size? It might be quicker to plug the two computers directly in and use firewire target mode for real speed.
 
Hmm . . . sorry, don't have a clue what any of those acronyms stand for--except FTP and TCP. Wouldn't I have to go through a server to ftp a file? How would I set it up (from the OS9 computer to the OSX computer) using, say, Anarchie? Via IP address? Why would it be any faster than a direct Airport transfer?

Oh, yeah--this is the last time I'll be trying this!
 
AFP = Appletalk File Protocol (IIRC)
SMB = Server Message Block (aka CIFS, or "Windows File Sharing)
SSH = Secure SHell (kind of like an encrypted telnet, but more powerful and supports file transfers)

Yes, you would have to go through an FTP server to transfer a file. You can turn on MAC OS X's FTP server, and use an FTP client on the Windows machine (like a "web" browser, or the command-line FTP.exe program). Or, you can install an FTP server on the Windows machine (www.tucows.com), and FTP to it from the Mac.

As Roger said, do a search for SMB or SSH for tons of discussions on how to set them up.

Also, keep in mind that Airport is only 11mbps. Like every other 802.11b setup in the world, the best you'll probably ever see from that is about 5mbps. Add on file transfer overhead, and you're probably looking at 4mbps of actual data being pushed across the network. This means that the FASTEST that you should expect the file to transfer is in about 2hours, 20 minutes, so if this is still too slow for you, you should consider another method of copying the files (like Extreme, or Firewire, etc)

Rip
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top