Speed comparison; straight USB vs GBEnet to AEBS w/USB

[corbywan]

No easy title for this one!

I was just curios. I have a USB drive attached to my AirPort and am able to backup to it. I know that USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mb/sec so it's a pretty fast connection when plugged straight into the computer. If I have a 1GB wired connection to my AEBS which has USB 2.0 on it for the drive to plug into, am I going to see (basically) the same disk transfer speed as if it were plugged directly into the Mac, since the network connection speed is faster than the USB transfer speed? It seems like it would, even with the network overhead since the network speed is over twice as fast as USB.

Again, just curios. Popped into my head as I was backing up my wife's laptop this morning.

 

[ChrisA]

No easy title for this one!

I was just curios. I have a USB drive attached to my AirPort and am able to backup to it. I know that USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mb/sec so it's a pretty fast connection when plugged straight into the computer. If I have a 1GB wired connection to my AEBS which has USB 2.0 on it for the drive to plug into, am I going to see (basically) the same disk transfer speed as if it were plugged directly into the Mac, since the network connection speed is faster than the USB transfer speed? It seems like it would, even with the network overhead since the network speed is over twice as fast as USB.

Again, just curios. Popped into my head as I was backing up my wife's laptop this morning.

(1) The AEBS is a rather low powered machine and I doubt it can drive the disk at it's maximum rate. Most of those low-end NAS boxes on the market can't. For backup this hardly matters as it goes on in the background

(2) the "wire speed" of the network is 1000 Mb/s but TCP over IP, because of the protocol overhead runs at about 70% of "wire speed" or 700 Mb/S. (Still faster than USB but not fw800)

A full size server can read and write to multiple interfaces simultaneously at there wire speed. This takes some amount of RAM for buffering and a decent CPU and a multitasking OS. I wonder if the AEBS has any of these features?