How long does it take to copy 1 TB over a Gigabit network? Time and speed breakdown

A 1 TB transfer over Gigabit Ethernet works out to 2 hours 13 minutes 20 seconds at peak. That's the figure most home NAS owners see when backing up a laptop or seeding a media library. It's also the inflection point where upgrading to 2.5 GbE or 10 GbE starts to have a daily-usability payoff.

Transfer time

2h 13m 20s

At peak link speed

File size

1 TB

1000 GB

Link speed

1,000 Mbps

Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps)

Configuration

File Size

Connection Speed

Mbps

Estimated Transfer Time

2h 13m 20s

Speed Comparison

USB 2.0

4h 37m 46s

480 Mbps

USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4

3m 20s

40 Gbps

Gigabit Ethernet

2h 13m 20s

1 Gbps

Selected

10 Gigabit Ethernet

13m 20s

10 Gbps

WiFi 5 (ac)

5h 33m 20s

400 Mbps

WiFi 7 (be)

26m 40s

5 Gbps

SATA SSD

30m 18s

4.4 Gbps

NVMe Gen4 SSD

2m 22s

56 Gbps

How this is calculated

2.5 GbE brings this down to about 53 minutes; 10 GbE gets it to 13 minutes 20 seconds, identical to 100 GB over Gigabit. Cable costs are identical (Cat 6 handles all three), so the bottleneck is usually the switch and NIC combination. A consumer 10 GbE switch ports run $100-300 in 2026, which is finally low enough that the math starts working out for anyone routinely moving terabytes around.

Verdict

2h 13m is the number that turns an overnight backup into a 15-minute chore once you go 10 GbE. If you regularly move 1 TB+ over your LAN, 10 GbE has a real quality-of-life return on investment.