A direct Ethernet cable moved nearly 1TB between two Windows PCs

Moving a terabyte of data between two Windows PCs does not necessarily require cloud storage, a network-attached storage box or an external drive. XDA's Anurag Singh connected two laptops with a regular Ethernet cable, configured a tiny private network between them and copied nearly 1TB directly.

The hands-on guide reports transfer speeds around 100 MB/s on gigabit hardware and a completion time close to three hours. That is a result from one setup, not a guaranteed rate: the slower Ethernet port, cable, source and destination drives, protocol overhead and file sizes all affect performance.

How the direct connection works

Both laptops had full-size Ethernet ports, so no router or network switch was needed. Singh assigned the source laptop the static IPv4 address 192.168.50.1 and the receiver 192.168.50.2, using the subnet mask 255.255.255.0 on both. He then marked the connection as private, enabled network discovery and file sharing, and shared the source folder.

The receiving PC could open that share in File Explorer after authenticating with the source computer's Windows credentials. A direct cable creates the local network, but Windows' sharing settings and firewall posture still determine whether the machines can see each other.