Do laptops have 2 NICs? (wireless and wired)

[BlaiseEmby]

OK, dumb question - I am a seasoned programmer but know squat about networking hardware.

I have an ASUS G75VW. It has intermittent wireless networking issues - disconnects, slow transfers, etc.

When I run a backup to a NAS drive on the LAN (Western Digital MyCloud) via wireless it gets only about 3-4 MB/s (megaBYTES, not bits). Not bad for a daily (differential) backup (4-5 GB), but the weekly full backups are impractical (365 GB to backup = several DAYS!). The Wireless card is an Atheros AR9485WB-EG, which is supposedly capable of up to 100 Mbits/s, and they seem to have a pretty poor reputation.

So I ran a cat 5 cable and connected via the RJ45 port. This gave me about 23 MB/s, which is still slow for my gigabit LAN, but the backup would at least finish in 4-6 hours - manageable for an overnight job.

But now, even the wired connection only yields about 3 MB/s.

Under Device Manager, I see the wireless card, but I also see an Atheros AR8151 PCI-e gigabit Ethernet controller. Is this a separate card, or is this part of the wireless card? It would seem to be the latter (all on 1 card) because when I Google AR8151, I only find drivers, not hardware.

The thing is, I thought I might replace the wireless card, but since the wired connection is now also slow, I was wondering if replacing the wireless card will fix both connections, or must I also replace the AR8151 "hardware"?

I also have an ASUS G750JH, and it has an Intel N-6235 wireless card. But Device Manager also shows an Atheros AR8171 gigabit network controller. So it seems that there might be 2 separate pieces of hardware.

I'm confused ... Thanks for any help!

 

[bill001g]

In most laptop there is a small wireless card that can be replaced if you want. The ethernet port though is part of the motherboard, it is in one of the large chips that do many functions and support the CPU.

Many nas devices, especially the budget consumer ones, can not transfer data really fast. You would need raid and other functions to get the speed up.

Still 3MB is extremely slow. What you want to test is copy a single very large file and see what you get for speed. When you copy lots of little files it tend to take more for the overhead than the data transfer.

If you have 2 pc you can try a old programs called IPERF. This tests just the network part of the devices ignoring any disk.memory or cpu limitations. In most cases you will get about 90% of the port speed...ie 900mb.

 

[jsmithepa]

Do laptops have 2 NICs? (wireless and wired)

Yes.

To narrow down where the problem may be, temporarily disable WIFI and deal with one thing at a time. Engineers of any persuasion including software engineers, call this reducing the number of variables.

 

[BlaiseEmby]

In most laptop there is a small wireless card that can be replaced if you want. The ethernet port though is part of the motherboard, it is in one of the large chips that do many functions and support the CPU. ....

Thanks for the clarification!