How can I test if a wireless-N router improves LAN throughput?

Question

On my network we have a Windows Home Server and my wife's Macbook Pro. Her office is in the opposite corner of the house from the WHS (which is wired to the router). We've been using the wireless router that AT&T provides, but have been experiencing a lot of slowness, specifically related to accessing the WHS box (for archive storage and time machine). So, I've picked up a 802.11n router (D-Link RangeBooster N Dual Band Router), but would love to see if there's an objective way to see how much difference we're really seeing over the old setup.

Is there a particular tool I should be using to test? Is just copying files between the two machines going to be a comprehensive enough test? I don't even know if there's a way to see the rate of transfer when copying on the Mac...

Answer 1

You can just copy files across and time how long it takes. There other ways though.

You can use dd, this should be present on OSX:

time dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048 count=100000 of=/tmp/out.tmp

This will create a 100MB (1048 Byte blocksize * 100000 times) empty file in /tmp and output the total time it took to create it. Just change the "of" (output file) parameter to a location on your WHS to test network speeds.

eg.

100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out

real    0m17.033s
user    0m0.150s
sys     0m3.520s

Once you have the time it took (add up the three times) you can divide the filesize by it to get your speed.