You can put an ethernet cable between them and transfer via file sharing
also large capacity usb flash drives are good
or file sharing through airport

 

Thanks Mark

Will give it a try in am.
Which of these methods would be the fastest?

 

If both your Macs are made in the last 4 years, i would think they both have gigabit ethernet. I just transferred a few big files between two macs with file sharing turned on and put an ethernet cable between them, it took some fiddling to figure out things, you can also set the finder prefs to show networked places on the desktop which is helpful for me.

Anyway, the gigabit ethernet was very very fast, I was amazed to see a 550 MB file take a few seconds to move over.

Airport is simpler in that you dont need any additional hardware but it is the slowest.

Usb hard drives and flash drives cant be beat for being handy to move files around to any computer, speed is ok, I thought the Gigabit network was faster.
But I have a $20, 4GB flash drive to move files around when i need to and you can take them anywhere in your pocket. I see 8Gb ones now for $30

Firewire target disk mode is good if both have firewire 400, it isnt too hard to set up and the speed is somewhat better than USB 2.0, if both have firewire 800 then the that would be the fastest way to move data by far.

 

I just tried to upload about 44GB of movies onto my hard drive and it was going to take about 4 hours... so what I did was I disconnected the HD from the iMac and connected it directly to the Macbook Pro and now it's taking less than 15 minutes for the transfer.

I wonder what the speed would be if I were to transfer a file that is less than 500mb from my Macbook Pro to my iMac (where the HD is connected)? Also if I were to play back the file would be choppy?

 

If I'm reading your post correctly, you just bought both machines, right?

So, quick question: why do you want to transer the movies from one to the other?

The reason I ask that, is that if what are wanting to do is store all the movies on one system (assuming the iMac) and then watch them on your macbook (connected to your tv), you could just stream them without having to actually copy them from one to the other.

IF you want to copy them in order to watch them on the MacBook away from your house, then yes, the above suggestion will work.

Another alternative is to get a portable hard drive and store all the movies on it. You then can take your entire collection with you when you wish to do so.

 

Boot one computer into "Target" mode by holding the t key at boot, then connect them together with a firewire cable. The target will show up on the other as an external drive. You may need to "get info" on the target computer and set it to ignore permissions while you do the transfer.

 

Boot one computer into "Target" mode

The OP stated in his original post that the MacBook does not have Firewire.

 

how do i access the shared network via Windows 7? I have 2 other computers at home that are windows but im not sure how to connect them to the network to view the shared files. On the macs i just put "AFP://ip" but on the windows I tried to do that in the address bar but it didnt work.