File transfer speed between 2 pc's connected over LAN

[Guest]

Ok, here's the deal. I have a pc and a laptop conected to the same router. The laptop (it has a Atheros AR5007EG Wireless Network Adapter which's speed I think is 54 Mbps) is connected via wifi (300Mb/s - routers wifi speed limit) and the pc uses an ethernet cable (1Gb/s - router's and my pc's card limit). I've set them to have the same workgroup etc. so I can access the laptop's shared folders with my PC. And here's what I don't get..

Shouldn't I be able to transfer the files at 54Mbps from my pc to the shared folder on my laptop - which is limited by my laptop's network card? But instead I get a mere 1.30MB/s.. I don't get it.. Is some other hardware limiting the speed? What factors come into play here?

 

[eibgrad]

54Mbps for a wireless G network is the theoretical limit (and doesn’t even consider network protocol overhead, it’s pure bits), but no one will ever achieve that in the real world, not even close. I'm running G here and in some cases I may get as little as 12-14Mbps. 1.30MB/s is only 10.4Mbps, which is exceptionally poor, but we don't know anything else about your environment that might explain it (distance, obstacles, signal strength, etc.). And because only two wireless stations can be transmitting at the same time, access to the AP is serialized. So you’ll also experience a loss of throughput if you have any other wireless clients accessing that AP at the same time.

 

[Guest]

54Mbps for a wireless G network is the theoretical limit (and doesn’t even consider network protocol overhead, it’s pure bits), but no one will ever achieve that in the real world, not even close. I'm running G here and in some cases I may get as little as 12-14Mbps. 1.30MB/s is only 10.4Mbps, which is exceptionally poor, but we don't know anything else about your environment that might explain it (distance, obstacles, signal strength, etc.). And because only two wireless stations can be transmitting at the same time, access to the AP is serialized. So you’ll also experience a loss of throughput if you have any other wireless clients accessing that AP at the same time.

Well, there is a wall between my router and laptop, or more precisely, the router is exactly on the other side of the wall. Signal strength on my laptop is excellent. I have no other clients accessing at the same time.
When I've tried this with my other laptop which has a DW1501 Wireless-N WLAN Half-Mini Card (This card supports speeds only up to 72 Mb/s in 802.11n) and is further away from the router (it think it was three walls between), I got around 3.3MB/s. So the network card is the main factor here just I can believe that there's such a gap (ok, so 72 is theoretical max so let's take 50mbs which should be 6.25MB/s and I'm only getting 3.3.. 🙁
So I'm guessing the second factor that could limit the speed is the HDD if the speeds are huge (over 100 or so..) and a SSD is not used.. Does the processor, RAM or any other component have any effect on the speed of transfer whatsoever?

 

[bill001g]

I doubt it things like harddrives or memory the machine would run slow in general. You really should try both cabled to the router via ethernet and see what happens. You also could put the laptop next to the router. These would give you the maximum possible numbers you could achieve.

You can try a old tool called IPERF. This tests only the network it uses no disk drives or applications. If there is a significant difference in speed with this tool compared to file copies then you can start checking software patches or harddrives.