Don't try this at home...
 

This morning I did a smart update to an image on a firewire
drive attached to the mac.

It took about 19 minutes, good! The image is about 50GB

I had a copy of the image on a USB disk attached to my
linux system so I nfs mounted the partition containing the
image and repeated the smart update.

This time it took 3.5 hours, bad!

Home network backups suck*.

* The linux box is connected to the local net via wireless g ( 6MB/sec?)
The usb drive is connected to the linuxbox and hdparm asserts
a 25MB/sec read ability.

It took about 40 minutes to copy the original disk image from the
fire drive to the usb drive (both connected to the linux box).

Jerry

This all depends on the speed of your network, Jerry. I update a very large sparse image on the network every day, and it takes less than 20 minutes.

We can't go any faster than the system lets us go...

What'ca got gigabit e'net? i was only getting about 350KB/sec writing
files via NFS.

Jerry

Yes, it's gigabit ethernet. The point being, it all depends on the speed of the connection...