I have a load of video files on my laptop that i want to transfer onto my PC. Both the laptop and computer are wireless and i have the bog standard router that got supplied with my TalkTalk broadband I setup a home group and was seeing speeds of around 800kbps. I disabled homegroups and setup shared folders and had speeds of 1MB/s Should i be seeing speeds faster than this? when downloading from the internet i max out my connection and see speeds of around 1.5MB/s, should transferring locally be faster?
You're transferring via Wi-Fi, that's your problem. Hook it up to an Ethernet port, on both the PC and laptop, and your files will fly across.
This is especially true if all your devices are gigabit capable, you'll be able to transfer up to around 100MB/sec. If its only fast ethernet, you'll be limited to around 10MB/sec.
When copying locally on your network your wifi has to cope with the data twice, source to the router then router to destination. You will see lower speeds doing this than when you download from the internet as that is only sending the data across the wifi once (router to computer). Basically you are hitting the bandwidth limits of your wifi connection as has been said before.
If it's a one time transfer, then just take the disk out of the laptop, and attach it directly to the desktop computer. (I'm assuming it's a SATA drive in the laptop, and you have a spare port, cable and power in the desktop)
Connecting the laptop and pc via ethernet to the router isn't an option as the router is in a different room to the pc, ill try wiring just the laptop in to see what gains there are. Maybe I should invest in some home plugs. As for removing the drive, I'm going to be ttansfering files every week or two so that isn't really a good option but I think I will start off doing this to get a head start Sent from my Lumia 820 using Tapatalk
Crossover cable is your friend. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/connect-two-computers-crossover-cable#1TC=windows-7
pretty sure cross over cables are irrelevant nowadays as network ports are auto-sensing. if i remember correctly homegroup encrypts the data so transfer speeds can suffer significantly as the SSL overhead kicks in. homeplugs may help as they do offer better transfer speeds should your Wi-fi signal be poor or busy (wi-fi shares all bandwidth between all connected devices it isnt full speed to each device). homeplugs suffer from this also however so the more you connect the slower overall it will be.
Ops use case is intermittent large file transfers from a laptop to desktop. Crossover network is the cheapest, fastest solution for that. Home plug is still not that quick and is going to set you back what £50? where as Crossover should get you gigabit for about £2 As far as cables go I've never tried a pc to pc connection with straight cables, if it works great.
yeah hard wired is the best way forward although i wouldnt like the idea of unplugging and plugging my network cable to transfer files all the time. im guessing the talk talk router will be 100mb ports so a possible alternative would be to use a gigabit switch and plug both the PC and laptop in to that then a cable from there to the router. 4 port gigabit switches are only around £10-15
Buy a cheap router and plug your PC in to that, then your laptop in to the router. It'll only ever be used for transferring between the two machines, no internet traffic.
so i went with plugging my hdd straight into the pc to transfer the bulk of files. i plugged my laptop into the talktalk router and connected the pc via wifi with gave me a bit of an increase but still not as fast as i would like. Ill try connecting the pc and laptop via a normal network cable and see what happens. ill take a look into the switch and router options on the weekend. thanks for everyones replies
Just in case you come across this again, any half decent (usually independent) computer shop will make you an ethernet cable long enough to span several rooms for less than a tenner. I do it for customers all the time - it takes 10 minutes and the cost of the cable/plugs is next to nowt. Handy to have for future copies/troubleshooting too.
If you are going to be transfering lots of small files or a large amount of data you are absolutely going to be best by using some form of ethernet. If both devices support gigabit and you use a gigabit switch or connect the devices directly and you use cheap cat 5e you can expect up to around 60-70mb/s (hard drive / CPU dependent on each device). I often achieve this over gigabit yet wirelessy transfering files over 802.11n on one side only sees real world speeds of as low as 6mb/s. Even with n wifi I'll still hardwire in for any heavy transfering.
Forgot to update this thread, I went with a crossover cable from ebay for £2, seeing speeds of 11mb/s which is good enough for now.
