Mixing Wireless and Wired Connectivity - Any point?

[blackwoodfx]

Short and sweet; is there any point in mixing wired and wireless connectivity with a Mac Pro? Would this bump up/down speeds at all?

 

[jonnymo5]

It will use one or the other, and in my experience it seems to favor wireless so for your best speed plug it in and turn off the airport.

Besides, carrying the Mac Pro from room to room gets pretty tiring

 

[Honumaui]

not sure but think you mean bonding them together somehow to get more speed ?

thats been covered dont bother

but I use both wireless and hard wired in our home office everything is hardwired but we have wireless airport and as mentioned keep the airport off on our main macs and let the wireless devices pick up on the wireless like the PS3 etc.. Iphones etc.. that way the macs stay quicker to each other

 

[goMac]

Nope, no advantage.

Why bother anyway? They both go to the same internet connection, which is slower than your wired anyway. If your wired was maxing out your internet connection, there isn't any bandwidth left over for the wireless anyway.

 

[blackwoodfx]

Nope, no advantage.

Why bother anyway? They both go to the same internet connection, which is slower than your wired anyway. If your wired was maxing out your internet connection, there isn't any bandwidth left over for the wireless anyway.

The thought was to use on NIC for uploading files (like Dropbox Syncing for example), while using the second NIC for downloading. I know in a server setup that is certainly possible and actually a great way to spread resources.

If not spreading upload/download resources, what other setups would you employ the 2 NICs for?

 

[goMac]

The thought was to use on NIC for uploading files (like Dropbox Syncing for example), while using the second NIC for downloading. I know in a server setup that is certainly possible and actually a great way to spread resources.

If not spreading upload/download resources, what other setups would you employ the 2 NICs for?

A single NIC is already fast enough to handle up/down on your internet connection. Unless you have some really super internet connection that none of us know about. And I mean, faster than anything you could possibly ever get from Comcast fast.

Dual NICs would be for server usage. One NIC might connect to the internet, and then you serve that connection into your network on the other NIC.

Separate Up/Down on NICs might be a good idea if you were talking to very large RAID volumes. But usually people use fiber channel for that. I just can't think of any internet connection available to mere mortals, however, that could possibly strain a gigabit NIC. The only way it makes sense is for talking to other machines inside your network with very high data transfer rates.

 

[Dr.Pants]

There is no point, unless you're serving data on the same network as said before. And even then you'd be better off with a switch that supported link aggregation then even using the wireless connection.

Wireless is insecure (especially when paired with massive-volume-transfer) and prone to noise (microwaves, etc).

You will see no difference on internet access. Check your modem's documentation, it will probably have a 100MB LAN port on it - you would have to saturate that connection* (you won't) to saturate a wireless network and you wouldn't saturate your wired network (unless you have some crazy setup with a hub).

*Well, 600 Mbits wireless N /800Mbits Fast Ethernet, but you get the idea, you still won't achieve that

 

[goMac]

Yeah, your modem, at most, has a gigabit connection on it anyway, so it can only goes as fast as one gigabit port. Most consumer modems have 100 megabit, even.