Does anyone know if particular recovery commands are faster then others. Or is a restore done with the recovery catalog faster then a controlfile restore?

Here is why I ask. I am doing a partial restore of a database to another node , I am restoring 26G and it takes over 24 hours. The total database is 54G and backs up in less then an hour. I know that network speed is affecting my performance and I fully expected it to take longer with 10Mbit ethernet but not this long. So I am wondering if the fact that I am doing datafile restores using the controlfile not the recovery catalog is also hampering performance.

Oracle 8.1.6
Unix 11.0
Omniback II

Thanks