Ok, so first up a noobie alert: while I’m comfortable with individual devices, software and even a bit of development, I know very little about networking.
However, I’m in the middle of upgrading my NAS and, as part of that process I’m backing up my current HDs to Dropbox prior to moving them across into the new box. It was taking so long over Wi-Fi that I bought a USB-C/Ethernet adaptor and splashed out on a CAT-7 cable with the intention of plugging the laptop directly into the network.
I’ve plugged the Ethernet cable directly into my router and started the back up process again - but I’m not seeing any increased speed. In fact, it’s potentially slower.
Am I doing something wrong here? Or is the fact that I’m backing up to Dropbox making any hard wiring redundant?
You can also change the priority of network connection in System Preferences > Network:
Click on the gearwheel at the bottom of the network connections and change the service priority by dragging Ethernet (USB adapter in your case) to the top and WiFi to the send place.
What speed connection do you have to the internet? It’s likely that your wifi is going to be way faster than your net connection anyway so switching to ethernet won’t make a difference. (although this probably will help when you start moving files to/from your NAS and traffic is just over your own network).
Perhaps go to google, search for speed test and run that, try this with the cable disconnected over wifi then try with wifi off and the cable plugged in, see if you’re actually getting a noticeable difference.
Typically in the UK we don’t have such fast connections to the net though if you’re on fibre and paying a huge amount per month, then you may have a super fast connection. Depending on the size of the disk you’re trying to copy over to dropbox it wouldn’t surprise me if you’re looking many many hours to upload even quite a small disk.
Thanks for the reply @MacExpert - really appreciate it.
Yup, I’ve done all that without any luck. The only difference being that my connection is called USB 10/100/1000 LAN2- I don’t have an Ethernet option. But, the right side of your screenshot there matches up without a problem.
I think you called it. I used to see this problem frequently. MacBooks would prioritize WiFi over Ethernet, regardless of the Service Order. Mail.app was really bad to do this.
