Mac to Mac connection speed via ethernet?, Tools?

Activity Monitor.app could give you a basic idea of your network activity. I’d assume that you’d get Gigabit speeds if both NICs can do it.

You could try using iStat Menus to see what your network throughput is. Move a big file and check what the speed is. And it will show you what your Peak in/out throughput is.

edit :: I would like to add that I have used iStat Menus for years. It has never caused any problems.

If both of your Macs have GigE NICs, then yes. But also you need the right catagory of cable. A regulat Cat5 ethernet cable is only rated for 10/100 Mbps while Cat 5e is rated for 10/100/1000 Mbps. As for a tool to monitor transfer rates I second johnpowell. Also, how are you connecting the two computers? Is it a direct cable or are you using a switch? If you are directly connecting the computers you are going to need a cross over cable. If you use a switch, make sure it is GigE as well.

b- they are directly connected, no switch. I think older macs (and PCs?) have to use crossover cables but relatively new Macs (within the last 4 years) can use a regular ethernet cable (they autosense)

the first mac with autosensing ethernet was the titanium laptop. since then, all macs autosense.

using cat 6 cable on two modern macs (within past 2 years or so) will give you serious speed in the gigabit range.

There actually is no speed difference on using Cat 5e or Cat 6 in Gig/E ethernet. Cat 6 will work at speeds over 1000 Mbps, but is slightly more expensive than Cat 5e.
But thanks for the info on auto sensing NICs, I did not know that!

@b… that’s interesting to hear. do you have a reference on that? my research here suggests that using cat6 will improve performance by minimizing packet loss… if the goal is maximum speed, shouldn’t we want to minimize packet loss?

@johnp- I actually have the iStat widget installed and did a little test (great idea, btw):

- a single150MB file transfered at a rate of 7Mb/sec to 15Mb/sec (it really was all over the place but mostly in megabytes… or megabits? I can never get that straight, one is 8 times less, is that right?)

- a 500MB file of several files (I just dragged the Photoshop CS3 folder over) was much slower… mostly in the 100s of Kb/sec, at times getting as high as 16Mb/sec

I think the results above show the limitations of the disk write speed on the receiving computer, if anything, after the RAM is filled

@ samkusnetz – Packet loss is not going to be a problem in the setup blippio described. My info comes from CCNA training modules and books. But we are getting off subject. I will comment you some more info.

Just a thought, but if you can, consider connecting them with a FireWire cable instead. Just as easy and massively faster than even GigE.