Ethernet speeds

The short version:
I've got my PC hooked up to a Sony Bravia TV down in the basement, and I have a media player connected to a Netgear Nighthawk in the living room—which is set up as an Access Point and also linked back to the Sony Bravia TV. Every time I try to stream movies from my PC over to the media player, the transfer speed tops out at about 8 MB/s. Since everything in the chain (the PC, the Sony Bravia TV, and the Netgear Nighthawk) is rated for Ethernet speeds, I was really expecting things to fly much faster than that. Does anyone have any idea what might be bottlenecking the connection?

Maybe this is a silly question, but are the devices connected via Ethernet or wirelessly?

A standard 7.2k RPM hard drive—which is actually pretty fast—can handle about half the theoretical bandwidth of an Ethernet connection. On top of that, since the early days of Windows, data transfer algorithms have been constantly roasted for being incredibly inefficient and painfully slow because they lean way too heavily on error checking to minimize data corruption.

Plus, we all know the whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and usually, that’s the router. There’s an endless supply of cheap routers out there (basically the junk our local ISPs hand out), versus actual serious routers that cost a bit more but actually come with decent components, protocols, and software...

In your situation, I can only say that the Sony (let's be honest 😬) isn't exactly a high-end piece of gear; I've owned one myself. Beyond that, people tend to mess things up even further by tinkering with the firmware. So, if you ask me, that's likely part of why things are crawling, though it's definitely not the only culprit...

darkowl72 said:A standard 7.2k RPM hard drive—which is actually pretty fast—can handle about half the theoretical bandwidth of an Ethernet connection. On top of that, since the early days of Windows, data transfer algorithms have been constantly roasted for being incredibly inefficient and painfully slow because they lean way too heavily on error checking to minimize data corruption.

Plus, we all know the whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and usually, that’s the router. There’s an endless supply of cheap routers out there (basically the junk our local ISPs hand out), versus actual serious routers that cost a bit more but actually come with decent components, protocols, and software...

In your situation, I can only say that the Sony (let's be honest 😬) isn't exactly a high-end piece of gear; I've owned one myself. Beyond that, people tend to mess things up even further by tinkering with the firmware. So, if you ask me, that's likely part of why things are crawling, though it's definitely not the only culprit...

That actually reminded me of something, so I just tested it out by moving a file between an HDD and an SSD on my own machine to check the speeds. It hit about 120 MB/s, which is pretty close to 1 Gbps. That was just doing a disk-to-disk transfer on a single PC.

That’s why I was asking if the whole setup is hardwired—if any part of this is wireless, then those speeds make more sense. From what I gather, we're looking at four different devices here (the PC, an ASUS router, a Sony router, and a media player). Which media player are we talking about?

Everything in my setup is hardwired with cables, and I'm running a Sony media player equipped with a 4TB WD Red 3.5" SATA drive inside. The data flow basically goes from my PC, through my General Electric gear, over to my Dell, and finally hits the media player. I had a hunch that the General Electric unit might be the bottleneck in this chain, but unless I've got my facts wrong, that part should support Gigabit LAN just fine.