Why is sharing faster?

[jepeters]

I had an 80 mb video file on a workstation. I copied it to the server so I could copy it to other workstations. It took a couple of minutes to copy the file from the server to another workstation.

But, when I set up the original workstation to share the file, and then went to another workstation and copied it directly from workstation to workstation, it took about 15 seconds.

Why the difference? Granted, our server is 3 years old, (a 200 mhz Pentium II) and the workstations are PIII, 650 mhz or higher. But this is just file transfer--should the processor make that much difference? The hard drive on the server is wide scsi, so I can't see why that should be so much slower than the hard drives on the newer computers.

What is causing the slowdown when using the server? Am I wrong in thinking that the processor speed shouldn't be causing the slowdown?

[glc]

What speeds are your network cards? What other work is the file server doing at the same time?

In the days of 10 megabit coax, we used to run 3 parallel NIC's in servers to increase the bandwidth.

[jepeters]

we were going at 10 originally, but last spring we replaced our 10 mbs hubs with 100 mbs switches. NICs are running at 100

[jepeters]

I was doing this at night, so there was virtually NOTHING else happening on the network