Time Capsule vs. Xserve G5 speed tests

[C(-)ris]

I've been getting my Xserve G5 ready to take the place of my 1TB Time Capsule. Part of that has been getting benchmarks of transfer speeds to the two devices. My original issue with the Time Capsule was that it was too slow(music skipping and stuttering) trying to read music off the drive from iTunes and stream to an Airport express while doing a file transfers from the iMac. Right now I just have the stock Apple 80GB 7200rpm drive in the Xserve. Time Capsule is the stock 1TB drive. Each device is directly connected to a 24 port gigabit switch along with the two client machines I used. I used an iMac G5 and a MacBook Pro for my testing. The iMac G5 has a 250GB 7200rpm drive, MacBook Pro has been upgraded to a 200GB 7200rpm drive. iMac runs 10/100 and obviously should be slower transfer rates, the MacBook Pro is Gigabit Ethernet. Here are my results, I'm a bit confused by the read speeds from the Time Capsule on the G5. They seem to be WAY WAY slower than it should be.

iMac G5
Write to Time Capsule
1:18.9 for 609.2mb to Time Capsule
1:05.4 for 609.2mb to Xserve

Read from Time Capsule
2:32.6 for 609.2mb from Time Capsule
1:00.2 for 609.2mb from Xserve

MacBook Pro Gigabit 200GB 7200rpm Drive
Write to Time Capsule
0:52.9 for 609.2mb to Time Capsule
0:20.0 for 609.2mb to Xserve

Read to Time Capsule
0:32.0 for 609.2mb from Time Capsule
0:13.8 for 609.2mb from Xserve

The iMac G5 could write to the Time Capsule near as fast as the Xserve, I am assuming that this is topping out the network connection. What I can't figure out is why the read speed is so slow. I would have guessed it would have been similar to the Xserve and that the network interface was the limiting factor. Is something crippled in the Time Capsule or does it not play nice with 10/100 devices? The TC itself can handle faster transfer rates, the MacBook Pro had much faster read and writes. I can't wait to see the transfer rates from the MacBook Pro to the Xserve once the RAID drives are installed.

[mikebw]

Great info, thanks for sharing.

[Jimmypoo]

What is the matter with you?

Why can't you just do what normal people would do, and get twin 1U racks, containing quad E7100
Hitachi Enterprise drives, rack mount in a standard 7 foot open rack, connect them by Infiniband to
each other and to your Gigaswitch, and quit this insane penny pinching?!?

These stories of wiring up a house through the floors instead of just running fiber optics through the
water pipes are really getting boring! You could have had fiber in every drain in the house by now!

When you finally do it right, I'll buy that XServe from you for $150. Wouldn't want to see that go
to waste even though it is a bloated, overheating G5, unless you need it to heat the house.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Work through it step by step. Start with two MacBooks with Intel SSDs and then add in network links.

[M A V I C]

That "mb" is MB, right? Just want to make sure.

I get about 55MB/s r/w with my MDD (from a G5 and a MBP.) Contiguous files it's closer to 70MB/s. The MDD has a SATAII controller configured as RAID5. I'm surprised its faster than the xserve, especially considering the RAID config (5 is usually slower.)