Help needed with extremely slow ethernet

[barryhill]

Hi

I have successfully connected my mac mini to my old Windows 7 PC via ethernet, and can access all the files on the Windows 7 PC. I have an admin folder with about 300gb of data, which I want to copy over to my mac mini.

I started a 'copy' process and after counting all the files 500,000 or so, the copying started, but telling me it was going to take 21 DAYS. Er.... what?

I have, I think, set things up ok, but can anyone sugget why the copy process is going to take so long using ethernet (its a cat6e high quality cable)?

any suggestions would be very welcome. Or alternative ideas for transferring the data over. I want to shut my windows PC down asap.


Barry

 

[marclondon]

A USB external drive would be better if you have one. Even a large USB stick for chunks.

You can probably fiddle with the network device settings to speed ethernet up but it's easier in other ways.

Another way is to use a cloud service such as Dropbox.

M.

 

[drsox]

Hi

I have successfully connected my mac mini to my old Windows 7 PC via ethernet, and can access all the files on the Windows 7 PC. I have an admin folder with about 300gb of data, which I want to copy over to my mac mini.

I started a 'copy' process and after counting all the files 500,000 or so, the copying started, but telling me it was going to take 21 DAYS. Er.... what?

I have, I think, set things up ok, but can anyone sugget why the copy process is going to take so long using ethernet (its a cat6e high quality cable)?

any suggestions would be very welcome. Or alternative ideas for transferring the data over. I want to shut my windows PC down asap.


Barry

What do you have connecting the two units ?
What sort of switch ? Gigabit ?
Have you tried rebooting everything and trying again. I find sometimes that there are old DHCP and networking settings still hanging around when attempting to connect Win to Mac.
Is there a 3rd device you can use as an intermediary ? I always find that going Win>NAS>Mac is faster than direct. Is there a USB drive you can use ?

I also had some problems with file ownership when re-accessing. Make sure you test this IMO.

 

[maflynn]

I second the use of an external drive for that much data. Sounds like one of your computers is not using gigabit ethernet.

 

[Mr. Buzzcut]

Have you tried to copy a large single file? That may show if it's really a network issue. Common problem is speed / duplex mismatch. Aside from that it generally does twke much longer to copy many files due to the overhead on each machine of opening / creating / saving / closing each file. I'd archive them first then copy.

If an external disk is available then the other stuff really isn't worth the trouble. As others said, go that route.

 

[barryhill]

Hi all

I went the external HDD route in the end and got everything copied over in two stages in around 8 hours. It was a lot of stuff. But I will research the ethernet possibilities a bit more.

thanks for everyone's thoughts and help.


Barry

Have you tried to copy a large single file? That may show if it's really a network issue. Common problem is speed / duplex mismatch. Aside from that it generally does twke much longer to copy many files due to the overhead on each machine of opening / creating / saving / closing each file. I'd archive them first then copy.

If an external disk is available then the other stuff really isn't worth the trouble. As others said, go that route.

 

[for this]

21 days is way too long, like when I mistakenly copied huge files (about the same size as yours although mine was between two Macs) over WiFi and thought I was doing it over Ethernet.

Make sure you've turned off WiFi on both computers, sorry if you have done that...