Hello,

Would anyone be able to answer this simple question?

Part A:

If two computers, somewhat identical in harware, each with a 10/100
ethernet card onboard are connected through a non-wireless router,
have speed differences if :

Speed - Relative speed (not a max in kb/s)

- Files are Transferred among the two using the regular NetBios File Sharing
- Files are Transferred among the two using a FTPD on one, and a FTP
Client on the other using a LAN ip as the host (ex: 192.168.0.15)
- Files transferred using a couple of other file sharing applications?
Speeds and examples.

Part B: 

At the moment, I am unable to have the File Sharing fixed (please do
not provide an answer on how to have it done, unless you are answring
my other question) -- thus I use FTP, but the speeds are ranging from
1500kb/s to 4000kb/s which not fast enough for the file sizes I upload
and download from one computer to the other. Thus, is there another
application that will allow me to have faster transfers?

at 100MBps, you are supposed to MAX at about 12Mbps... Perhaps you
might concisely rephrase your question, especially Part A, where there
doesn't seem to be a question, in a clarification?

You might also try changing your duplex to half duplex on the network
cards of each computer. Theoretically, it may slow things down, but
sometimes it does actually speed things up.

OTOH, Gigabit ethernet is within reach, with cards as little as $15
(www.pricewatch.com) and 8 port Gigabit switch around $75. IMO, this
is a small investment to see a potential 10-fold increase in speed.

I made a mistake. 8 port Gigabit is about $98. There are smaller ones for less.

Hi aquamango-ga,

You could actually try the firewire networking(which could get you about
400Mbps, with much little CPU load compared to USB2.0). It is available
builtin in winxp, and you could add this to any desktop with a inexpensive
pci card and the software from unibrain(for win98,win2k etc.). If you need
to run the cable for longer distances, you might need a firewire repeater.

Regards
ldavinci-ga

Part A: relitive speed? im having trouble determining a speed other then max kb lol

and also unless you have some sort of bandwidth restrictor trying to
share through normal netbios or through ftp wont make a humanly
noticable diffrence.

also are you using a firewall? that might be causing you some trouble...

100Mbit is a max of 12.5MB/s

However, normal hard discs will struggle to transfer constantly at this rate.

Depends on the switch you're using.  Most SOHO switches won't transfer
at anything like the rated speed of the wire.  For example, the
Linksys I'm using right now peaks at about 15 MB/s, but you have to
remember that when transferring from one computer to another you're
actually tying up two ports on the switch, which share the peak speed
of the switch.  If you're using a hub things get worse.

If you're using a switch capable of driving all the ports at full
speed (e.g. something like a Cisco 3524 or 3550) then look at some
other things -- for example,

As someone else noted, fire walls will affect speed substantially.  

wasting-time's comment about disk speeds is germain too.  You may be
bottlenecked by disk speed.  However, 12 MB/s isn't too fast for a
fair number of the nicer drives on the market at this point.  So my
laptop would have trouble with it (and indeed clocks at about 3 MB/s)
but my Linux desk top can handle it just fine.

For an alternate file sharing mechanism, you could try NFS.  But it
doesn't come with Windows so you'll have to find it somewhere.