La Vita è Bella

On the Mac side, the initial backup takes me about 6 hours to backup 126GB data, by ethernet cable, so the speed is about 20GB/hr.

The writing speed via 802.11n wireless is as below:

fishy@Makelele:~/Video$ dd if=Pixar\ -\ Lifted.wmv of=/Volumes/Cacapa-1/foo.wmv
91582+1 records in
91582+1 records out
46890385 bytes transferred in 15.478993 secs (3029292 bytes/sec)

That's about 3MB/s. So I think the speed on Mac is acceptable, but it should be faster.

On the Linux side, I use Debian Lenny, with samba, afpfs-ng and a 100M ethernet cable (my Linux machine didn't come with a Gigabit ethernet port). The facts are:

Writing via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=foo/foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.89061 s, 649 kB/s

Writing via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=prog03.mdb of=/media/cacapa/bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 6.57683 s, 680 kB/s

Reading via AFP:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=foo/bar.mdb of=bar.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 8.87068 s, 504 kB/s

Reading via SMB:

root@deBoer:~# dd if=/media/cacapa/foo.mdb of=foo.mdb
8736+0 records in
8736+0 records out
4472832 bytes (4.5 MB) copied, 0.919922 s, 4.9 MB/s

So the conclusion is that, for writing, AFP and SMB are both slow. But for reading, SMB is much much faster than AFP, so you should use SMB to connect a Time Capsule on Linux.