OK slightly OT but vaguely audio related!

I've just bought a new laptop for mobile recording and have a large amount of data to get into it. I am trying to transfer about 60gigs worth of audio etc. from my PC (XP pro on a 54mbps wireless card) to the laptop (Vista on a 100mbps Ethernet connection). However, I am being told it will take near enough a day to do so! I am only getting 2mbps as a current transfer rate - should this not be much nearer to the 54mbps the wireless card supports?

Thanks if you can help me clear this puzzle up.

I think you are just looking at the numbers and not appreciating what they each mean.

For starters I think you are mixing up the data rate figures which are (always) expressed in bit/s, with the data volume throughput, which is expressed in bytes or Bytes/second. This would account for the largest disparity by a factor of 8.

The 54Mbit/s figure is the maximum symbol rate on the air interface. The connection works in half-duplex (i.e. each end of the link takes turns to transmit), and only achieves the full speed when there is sufficient signal-to-noise ratio anyway. Because of the relatively robust protocol (TCP) used to transfer the data, each frame of typically 1500 bytes is followed by an acknowledgment from the other end. Also there is a small orderly gap between the end of one transmission and the start of the next.

Also the 1500 byte frame is not 1500 bytes of user data, but includes an overhead of a few percent. And a few other factors lead to a further drop in efficiency compared to the theoretical maximum, including under-filled frames, other active connections, and other wifi users competing.

So somewhere in the ballpark of 2Mbyte/sec throughput (or user data rate of about 16Mbit/s) sounds correct. You find 100Mbit/s full-duplex ethernet runs noticeably quicker - like 10MByte/sec.

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TAKEN.BALL.GONE.HOME

Hi Pringe

Wireless can be quite flaky even when surfing and liable to loose connection multiple times during a 60GB trasfer,
thus for large size txfers its not the best.

For your purposes, the easiest would be to either
1. Purchase and external hard disk ... these are so cheap now and v.useful for backup.
2. Buy a CAT5 network cable and set up a mini network using static ip address and file sharing
3. Buy a USB transfer cable that comes with transfer software.

All three would give you fast txfer speeds.
Num 2 is the lowest cost yet more reliable than num 3.