54/108 wireless vs 100 wired lan speed

MajorPart · 27 Sep 2006 at 22:07

Anyone know what the real life speeds are. I have two PCs connected to the router using 54 wifi and one the main pc through a 100mb lan cable to the router. Transfering images etc from a wifi pc to the wired is about 2mb/s

As i transfer loads of images between pc's i'm wanting to hard wire them to the router but how much of an increase would i see and what about 108 wifi is much better than 54 in real life situations?

Many thanks.

shine · 27 Sep 2006 at 22:13

When transferring data between computers there is nothing better than using a wired connection unless you have a USB 2 drive. That has a faster data transfer rate than you 100 mb lan.

In theory it should be quicker but its unlikely to be much better than 54 at passing large amounts of data between computers.

Avalon · 28 Sep 2006 at 00:01

Moving data by USB (or what used to be termed sneaker net - That's Yanks for you) isn't practical for large files and you need to copy the data to the usb drive, unplug it then plug it back into the other PC and copy it off. I remember trying to copy 10GB via 11mbit wifi and after 2 minutes I gave up and plugged the laptop into the LAN I did the same on 54mbit and the outcome was the same, WiFi is great for web access and other lower bandwidth activity such as streaming media or moving smaller files about/downloads but i'd not fancy moving anything large over a wifi link.

Theoretically 54mbit should give you 6.6+/- MB a sec and 108 comes out at 13.3+/- in practice i'd take 100mbit wired every single time for a large file transfer as you have discovered in reality it's not quite that simple.

smids · 28 Sep 2006 at 00:43

Yeah wired. Usually on a wired connection I can hit about 80-90Mbits = 10-11Mb/s roughly. This is about as good as it gets unless you use gigabit where I got about 250Mbits IIRC.

shine · 28 Sep 2006 at 06:36

Avalon said:
Moving data by USB (or what used to be termed sneaker net - That's Yanks for you) isn't practical for large files and you need to copy the data to the usb drive, unplug it then plug it back into the other PC and copy it off.

I agree but I was just making the point that its faster

wesley · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:17

right ok guys, i'm a little confused with speed, connection and bits/bytes

100MB connection (wired), 100mb/8 = 12.8mb/sec transfering? the longer the cable is, the slower it gets?

what about the speed of hard drive write/read? surely its more than 12.5mb/sec?

here the screenshot of hdtach result of my laptop hard drive

from start, 47mb/sec, is that before or after the /8?

smids · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:22

Heh.

HDTach measures in MBytes, LAN/WAN connections are measured in M Bits/bips.

HDU's can write/read about 50 megabytes/s average and a Gigabit ethernet connection can transfer at 100 Megabytes/s. 100Mbps (bips).

Just think, whenever talking about internet speeds, always divide by 8, but when dealing with internal computer transfers, it is usually bytes.

wesley · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:27

so that's mean the speed of hard drive slow down due the speed of 100mb connection?

when transfering 1GB file over the network (100mb wired), speed of transfering would be 12.5mb/sec so it will slow down my laptop hard drive writing to 12.5mb/sec as it would be able to write of speed up to 50mb/sec?

am i talking crap today?

smids · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:30

wesley said:
so that's mean the speed of hard drive slow down due the speed of 100mb connection?

when transfering 1GB file over the network (100mb wired), speed of transfering would be 12.5mb/sec so it will slow down my laptop hard drive writing to 12.5mb/sec as it would be able to write of speed up to 50mb/sec?

am i talking crap today?

No - hard drives can still access, read whilst writing. The writes would be slowed down and generally, the HDU would be, but it's not entirely true to say it is slowed down to that speed....

wesley · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:37

ok thanks, was thinking of upgrading my network to gigaLAN (1000mb), it wouldnt improve the speed at all?

smids · 28 Sep 2006 at 11:42

wesley said:
ok thanks, was thinking of upgrading my network to gigaLAN (1000mb), it wouldnt improve the speed at all?

Well it would in that you would transfer much faster than on a 10/100 Lan - you would make full use of your HDU's speed.