I needed to archive 472MB of photos onto the home file server so that my wife could access them.
Over wifi, I got an estimate of 35minutes. Yes this is horribly slow, even for a 54Mbit “G” speed network.
So I plugged in the CAT5 cable, I disabled wifi on my laptop and I pressed refresh in windows explorer so that SMB2 was now talking on the wired network.
I performed the exact same drag and drop to copy the files and it was done in 5 seconds, almost faster than I could expand the Windows 7 copy dialog and see the transfer rate of > 50MBytes/second.