It’s possible to just connect two computers together with Ethernet and do a bit of IP configuration:
# Onsender…ip address adddeveth0fd42:dead:beef::1/48ip linkset deveth0up# Onreceiver…ip address adddeveth0fd42:dead:beef::2/48ip linkset deveth0up
After a few seconds, pings should work:
# Onreceiver…/ #pingfd42:dead:beef::164 bytes from fd42:dead:beef::1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.649 ms
64 bytes from fd42:dead:beef::1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.376 ms
64 bytes from fd42:dead:beef::1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.414 ms
64 bytes from fd42:dead:beef::1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.340 ms
# Onreceiver…socat- TCP6-LISTEN:1234|ddstatus=progress>big_file.tar.gz# Onsender…socat- ‘TCP6-CONNECT:[fd42:dead:beef::2]:1234′<big_file.tar.gz
These commands assume you are using Linux, but this trick works everywhere.
A nothing-special patch cable and ethernet jack should have no problem hitting ~900 Mbits/second, which is 6.7 GB per minute.
Fancy network cards will allow speeds orders of magnitude faster, but it's already much faster than USB flash or cloud storage.
for transferring a file larger than 10 GB or so between two machines a few meters apart.
Cloud storage: upload it to a server and download it from the other machine.
In most cases, this will be glacially slow, both because of slow internet connections and cloud providers throttling traffic.
Worse, the file has to be transferred over the network twice which doubles the time it takes.
Also, it can be expensive unless you already have a suitable server.
Direct TCPover LAN is better, but WiFi is still quite slow and with random dropouts:
those multi-gigabit speed claims are dubious at best and certainly won't be reached in a typical home networking environment (walls, interference, long distances, etc)