Firewire Connection is Slow

I have an iMac Core Duo and a new MacBook Core 2 Duo.
I've been transfering files between the two over the past week and noticed that the transfer rate is around 20MB/s ... Not to bad. But shouldn't I be getting upwards around 40 - 50MB/s?
Yes, I understand that both have a GB ethernet connection. But it's currently being used with my internet.
Both computers have manual IP addresses and it doesn't seem to matter if I have IPv6 on or off.
Any help would be appreciative.

I just tried that, between my MacBook and PowerBook.
Here's some things tried, observing the network rates in Activity Monitor:
When I copied a 7G chunk of my iTunes music folder, I got abot 16MB per second. This was done by dragging the folders in Finder.
Then I created a single 1G test file, and used the 'cp' command in a Terminal Window. This achieved about 20MB/sec.
Finally, I used the same 1G file, but copied it to 'dev/null' on the destination system. For those unfamiliar with /dev/null, you can view it is a bit bucket. Whatever you write to it is silently consumed, and not written to disk.
When copying across the firewire, to /dev/null, I got about 26MB/sec.
What can be concluded? Copying lots of files, as in the iTunes test, slows things down, compared to copying a single, big fgile. That's epected, there are lots more open and close operations being done, they take time, and they're done sequentially.
Copying to /dev/null improves the numbers. This suggests that the speed of the copy was being limited by the speed of the destination disk drive.
2.5" laptop drives aren't really very fast.
I didn't go to the next step and create programs to transfer large amounts of data without hitting the disk on either system, but I expect that would get rates closer to the theoretical maximum of something like 40MB/sec. (400 / 8, minus some for TCP/IP overhead)
Another good exercise for the curious would be to check the performance using gigabit ethernet. I expect the speeds to be about the same as FW, limited by the speed of the disks.
Quad G5, PB 15" 1.5Ghz,MacBook 2.0GhzCore2Duo Mac OS X (10.4.8) Logic Pro 7.2.3, Focusrite Saffire...

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