The Cult of the Cool Mac: Made with 100% USDA real meat!

Does a high-quality ethernet cable speed up file transfers?

Yes it does.

I was going to graph the results, but it doesn't seem worth it. My file-transfers saw a 13% speed increase across-the-board when I upgraded to CAT-6 cables. That's a pretty nice increase in speed, but I still am not getting the network-speeds that I should be getting.

On one of my Macs, my peak speed is about 9Mbps -- approaching the practical maximum speed for a 10-Base network. But I should be getting closer to 80Mbps because all of my equipment is supposedly running at 100-Base and my switch indicates a 100-Base duplex connection on every port. I suspect that the switch isn't negotiating the connection properly, but it's a cheap Linksys that doesn't permit fiddling with the port-settings. I'm going to look for a good managed switch that I can borrow to experiment further.