Is there any possible way to connect two computers directly to each other without a network?
I want to connect my laptop to desktop, hopefully by USB cable or possibly ethernet cord to transfer files off this computer to the other.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
There’s something that looks like an ethernet cable (but is not, precisely) called a crossover cable that hooks into your ethernet ports so that’s one possibility (that’s how I did it in the past pre-wireless/ firewire).
You can buy crossover cables that look like conventional network cables. You’ll also have to set up IP addresses on the computers so the two are on the same subnet but have unique addresses. Exactly how do to this depends on what software each computer is running. That would be the fastest option, though you can also look into “null modem” cables and whatnot, which may be simpler but with relatively turtlish speed.
And you may not need the crossover at all - many, perhaps most modern Ethernet cards will auto-detect if you use a crossover or “normal” Ethernet cable and “do the right thing.”
Not mine. Or any I’ve ever encountered. But I don’t encounter a whole lot of em I guess.
Just wanted to add, that yes, I did try mine. I have a MVP Haugepauge (sp?) device, and connecting it required a crossover cable, I bought a regular cable and it didn’t work. My NIC is less than 6 months old.
I’m sure you are already aware, but you can probably get a 10/100 switch for $15 or so, and then you don’t need to worry about finding a crossover cable.
If both computers have firewire ports, and some recent operating system (Windows XP works here, perhaps 2k as well?), you can simply connect the computers with a firewire cable. It’s about as easy as networking gets; just connect the computers and Windows takes care of the rest. This is usually how I connect my laptop with my desktop for any kind of large file tranfers – it’s even faster than the standard ethernet connection. Reference here. Apparently, recent versions of OSX also support this.
You should try one of the two listed ways. There is a USB one aslo, that I have never used, witch can be bought if dilligently sought. The other methods not mentioned are a pain in the butt and super slow, so I wouldn’t waste time using a crossover serial or parallell port cable. A clerk my try to sell you one if they don’t have one of those first three. Don’t do it that way.
If you have only IDE hard drive the you will not see a difference in transfer speeds with the Ethernet 100 and Firewire. The connection will have a capability that excedes the hard drive of a ATA 100 IDE hard drive.
Firewire will be much faster than 10/100 Ethernet. Ethernet has a maximum theoretical capacity of 100Mbps or 12.5 MB/s. In practise, it’s rare to attain more than 50% of this or about 7MB/s. Consumer hard drives run somewhere between 40 and 60 MB/s average transfer rates.
So your posting in agreement, or misreding what I posted?
I think he’s disagreeing. At least, I’m disagreeing:
Even with a relatively slow IDE hard drive, the bottleneck will occur with the ethernet or firewire link, not the hard drive itself. Firewire has a theoretical speed of 400 megabits per second, but usually achieve something around half that. An ATA 100 hard drive has a theoretical burst transfer rate of 100 megabytes per second, and as Shalmanese said, these drives will have something like 50 megabyte/second sustained transfer rates. Remember, in this context there are eight bits per byte, so firewire really only maxes out at 50 megabytes per second, and usually sees 25 megabyte per second transfer rates. And 10/100 ethernet really gives around 8 megabyte per second transfer rates. So, unless you’re using a really old and decrepit hard drive, you’ll see a performance increase with firewire networking instead of ethernet. I know I do, even from my dinky laptop hard drive to my desktop, where I see something like 8 megabytes per second over ethernet and 25 megabytes per second over firewire networking.
Now I’m confused.
I read shalmanese as saying that 100baseT ethernet is about 20-25% as fast as a consumer hard drive. in other words, ethernet network speed will be a bottleneck.
I read Harmonious Discord as saying that 100BaseT is as fast as, or faster than a consumer hard drive. So an ethernet network will be a bottleneck.
I’m not prepared to add detailed knowledge, wexcept to say that true througput on any real device as installed is far, far, below the advertised speeds, and to remind everyobody to pay attention to counting bits versus bytes. Finally, on tcp/ip connections, the conversion ratio for bits on the wire to bytes of useful information is more like 12 to 1 than 8 to 1 due to the packet overhead.
So while 100 megaBITs per second may be 12.5 megaBYTEs per second on the wire, after you add packet overhead & such, only 7 or 8 megaBYTEs of payload (files, etc) is really going to transfer per second. Add in some slowdown for less-than-ideal wiring & components & the real world rate is more like 5 megaBYTEs per second from protocol stack to protocol stack. Whether the particualr CPUs and disk subsystems involved can send or receive that fast is a whole 'nother question.
I see lazybratche beat me to it. Oh well …
Now that lazybratsche explained, I understand. I have to ask what about the FSB speed?
There’s an even easier alternative if all you need to do is transfer files. All but a very small number of Apple’s computers that have Firewire support ‘Target Disk Mode’. This will make the computer operate as if it were an external disk drive, and you can access the files from another computer to copy them. It also works in both OS X and Mac OS (but read this first if you have an Intel-based Mac).
To do this, shut down the computer to be used as an external drive, connect the Firewire cable, and restart the target computer while holding down ‘T’.
While this does get around file permissions on the target drive, it obviously won’t get to encrypted files, so if you need to get at that, use one of the networking methods already mentioned.
I’ve been lurking in this thread, hoping someone would use language even I could understand. Thank you.
I’ve been reluctant to try to transfer files from my antique G-3 to my non-Intel G-5 iMac. I have David Pogue’s The Missing Manual where in he explains what you describe (he calls it Firewire Disk Mode), but not exactly, or at least, not that I fully understand.
His example is power book to tower. He leads me to believe I need to hook up a separate monitor to the G-3 to do the file transfer.
Can I use the Target Disk Mode using only the iMac screen?
I do have an ancient, monster CRT in the closet, but if I don’t have to, I’d rather not hook it up.
He also goes into which firewire cable I need to use. How do I tell what I have? I think its a 6 pin, 400 cable. It’s coming from an old external CD burner.
Also, the G-3 has been sitting, unplugs for quite some time, will I have problems if the clock battery is dead?
To the Op, sorry for the hijack.
This is a network!
I take it you are looking for something very simple? The simplest way would be to get an external USB HDD and use that to transfer files. The next step up would be to network the two. As noted, network switches are very cheap. Your computers likely already have network adapters. Two cables, one switch. But for configuration, it very much depends on what sort of computers you have. It’s not plug and go.
As an alternative, how do you connect to the internet? Do you have cable or DSL? Or dial-up? If the former, you could get yourself a multiport router which goes between you and the DSL and plug both your computers into that, since such devices usually act as DHCP servers etc.
I have a cable modem which I connect to the internet through via a wireless router. I wanted to eliminate the need for the network and go directly assuming that using the router as a medium may have a built in firewall or decrease the transfer speed.