I've idly wondered about this and today I had a real world test.
I am copying a 64GB VM image between machines.
I knew it wouldn't work, but for fun I tried 802.11n. That was estimated to take days.
Then I tried Gb ethernet. OS X estimated 6 hours.
Then I tried firewire 400. It's little known, but 10.6 and earlier supported networking using Firewire (probably using Bonjour/Rendezvous discovery). Both machines assigned the one another an IP address and they connected (there was a little pizza spinning because I forgot to dismount a network share first).
The transfer was initially estimated to take 5 hours. Now it looks like it will complete in 30 minutes.
So it appears that OS X Firewire networking is much faster than Gb ethernet, which one wouldn't guess from the specs (Gb > 400 Mb). On the other hand, the firewire estimate started out as 5 hours and then suddenly sped up, so there's something quirky here.
Incidentally, doing firewire networking makes the laptop run hot. It's working ...
Interesting! I'm going to be transferring about 200gbs from a MacBook to a new iMac later this week. The iMac has FW 800 and the MacBook has FW 400. I wondered whether to go with the gigabit or try a bilingual 400/800 cable. Sounds like the cable is the way to go.
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