Windows reserves a chunk of bandwidth for it's own purposes, presumably to
give priority to the mouse & keyboard, or so that new devices will be
recognised or something.

USB2 is actually 480Mbps, and I've seen transfers of around 35MBs when I
could be bothered to time some backups.  Fast enough for most things.
That'll slow down if a second device starts up (especially if you're using a
hub) or you decide do some ray-tracing etc, but LAN will do the same thing.

I've got a FreeNAS box on a gigabit network (standard on boards these days,
hubs are cheap) and it runs quite well.  Haven't tested its speed though.

Firewire is a little bit faster, apparently it has less overhead compared to
USB.  I don't use it, so I can't say.

Tony



> The thing is that USB2 for network transfer in theory is 
> faster. Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't it shared with 
> other resources?
> 
> For 10Mbps the transfer rate is  1.2MBps For 100Mbps the 
> transfer rate is 12MBps
> 
> For most data transfer over the network I find that the 
> throughput of an actual file transfer is about 7MBps *Windows 
> file copies over the network* for a 100MBps nic. 
> 
> It is possible that the 100MBps can actually sustain 10MBps 
> using a tcp/ip transfer test program. The protocol does take 
> some of the bandwidth.
> 
> Anyway the 1Gbps is a whooping 120MBps. But that is a class 
> of it's own. Then again Windows needs to be pushing data down 
> the 1G nic to even start choking it.....
> 
> 
> Regards,
> John
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --- Tony Smith <ajsmith@rivernet.com.au> wrote:
> 
> > USB2 is 400Mbps, so in theory it should be faster. 
> > Sure you won't get that
> > speed, but you don't get 100Mbps on your LAN either.
> > 
> > That said, USB2 is hands-down faster.  Given the choice 
> I'll plug an 
> > external drive into USB over LAN.  External drives with Gigabit LAN 
> > don't seem to be common yet, nor USB-Gigbit LAN adapters either.
> > 
> > Floppy < USB1 < 10Mbps < 100Mbps < USB2 < 1000Mbps.
> > 
> > Now I'm wondering what people use those USB-LAN adapters 
> for.  Can't 
> > be that many old laptops out there?
> > 
> > Tony
> > 
> > 
> > > I do wonder whether the throughput of the USB
> > network comes
> > > close to 100Mbps NIC.....
> > > 
> > > John

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