[BSman]

Hi, I am thinking of upgrading my home network to Gigibit lan. My server doesn't have Gigbit NIC so will need to buy a PCI card for it. However, Gigibit lan is 1000MB/s but the PCI bus is only 133MB/s. How much faster is my network going to get? 33MB/s more is not enough to justify the expence for me. Does anyone have a PCI Gigibit NIC? and what kind of speed can you get from it.

In large trasfers from my laptop to my server I can sustain about 65-70MB/s What kind of speeds will I get with a Gigibit lan thats beeing limited by a 133MB/s PCI bus?

 

[xms]

The important thing to remember is that your network card is rated in MegaBITS, and the PCI Bus is rated in MegaBYTES.

1000mbit ~= 125mbyte

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms The important thing to remember is that your network card is rated in MegaBITS, and the PCI Bus is rated in MegaBYTES. 1000mbit ~= 125mbyte

I am currently taking Cisco Networking classses and what they are currently exoplaining is that gigabit ethernet is messy and on a copper media is nearly impossible, meaning you most likely will not even reach the 1 gigabit level.

Also the way the info is transmitted on the wires is Rx and Tx on the same line which creates a lot of collissions, the collission will corrupt alot if thte information being transfered, which would forrce the info to be retransferred taking double the time, so if you get it running don;t get your heart set on actually making the 1 Gb, I would recommend staying on the 100Mb becasue you will rarely ever use the full 100Mb and it has much less errors because the Tx and Rx are on different wires.

 

[MrSmiley]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms The important thing to remember is that your network card is rated in MegaBITS, and the PCI Bus is rated in MegaBYTES. 1000mbit ~= 125mbyte

Only one flaw in that acctually it is less than 125mbytes a second because one out of 8 of those bits are sign bits which contains it's own set of information (hince why kilo byte is 1024 bytes) and that sign bit can not have data passed through it.

Also I do agree with mfilfpot that they are highly unstable and I would try to stay away with them if you could till they improve, but what's the fun in that ???

Anyways don't forget that also a 10/100 switch is 12.5mb/s correct me if I'm wrong but the 100 is also a megabit anyways I told you a little bit.

 

[xms]

Just go fibreoptic

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms Just go fibreoptic

Fiberoptic cables are coming doen in price to reasonable prices, but to do that you will still need the optical NICs and routes which can be quite expensive.
with the current prices I have already decided that when I finish the upgrade on my PC that I will invest in a home optical net.

 

[xms]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfillpot Fiberoptic cables are coming doen in price to reasonable prices, but to do that you will still need the optical NICs and routes which can be quite expensive. with the current prices I have already decided that when I finish the upgrade on my PC that I will invest in a home optical net.

Yeah, fibre does seem to work very well. I use a fibre backbone for my 3 server racks.

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms Yeah, fibre does seem to work very well. I use a fibre backbone for my 3 server racks.

Yeah I would love to use fibre because it is immune to EMI which causes file corruption, the electrical charges on copper can be effected, but the light on fibre can't be touched so it also has a higher good data % to go with the higher bandwidth.

when running a network fibra at it's current cost is a much better product than Ethernet and only slightly more expensive.

 

[VulcanDragon]

Looks like you would need to use a switch to connect you home LAN if you wanted to transfer faster than 100 Mb/s, I don't see any 10/100/1000 routers on NewEgg so I assume they don't exist? Just dropping a Gb NIC into your PC won't accomplish much if your router is only 100 Mb.

Is configuring a switch more difficult than a router, or is it comparably simple?

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by VulcanDragon Looks like you would need to use a switch to connect you home LAN if you wanted to transfer faster than 100 Mb/s, I don't see any 10/100/1000 routers on NewEgg so I assume they don't exist? Just dropping a Gb NIC into your PC won't accomplish much if your router is only 100 Mb. Is configuring a switch more difficult than a router, or is it comparably simple?

A switch is stil more less a dumb device like a Hub, so a router configuration is the most difficult. If you are running a true network of >2 PCs then you will need teh switch, if you only have 2 PCs you can just use a crossover ethernet cable to directly connect the two computers.

 

[xms]

Or...if indeed you are just running 2 machines, you could go firewire?

A firewire network should run at around 480 Mbps i think?!

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms Or...if indeed you are just running 2 machines, you could go firewire? A firewire network should run at around 480 Mbps i think?!

A firwire network is possible but not common because there are still many systems that do not have firewire(IEEE 1394).

 

[xms]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfillpot A firwire network is possible but not common because there are still many systems that do not have firewire(IEEE 1394).

Just invest in a couple of Soundblaster cards with firewire built-in

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms Just invest in a couple of Soundblaster cards with firewire built-in

We still come down the the big question ,when you are networking you only get 50% bandwidth, so if he uses 100Mbs he will get 50Mbs, how often would you be transferring more information than that unless you are running a Internet or large business server?

 

[xms]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfillpot We still come down the the big question ,when you are networking you only get 50% bandwidth, so if he uses 100Mbs he will get 50Mbs, how often would you be transferring more information than that unless you are running a Internet or large business server?

p0rn? Just a guess

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms p0rn? Just a guess

Ok, DSL maxes out at 1.5Mbs, Cable at 3.6Mbs, even with calbe and a 100BaseT(100 Mbs LAN) at try bandwidth of 50Mbs you woul still have 46.4Mbs unused.

 

[BSman]

I am always using my home lan. I was working on my server and I checked the stats of my network connecting. It had been running for 10 days and in that time I had tranfered over 500GB of information. I dont know how I use it all. Some things I do though: Play games using a cd image on my server computer (over the lan) stream movies from my server to my laptop. I have my download software on my laptop so anything thats get downloaded or uploaded get transferd.

Oh and firewire is a no go. I have 7 computers in the house and they all need internet.

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by BSman I am always using my home lan. I was working on my server and I checked the stats of my network connecting. It had been running for 10 days and in that time I had tranfered over 500GB of information. I dont know how I use it all. Some things I do though: Play games using a cd image on my server computer (over the lan) stream movies from my server to my laptop. I have my download software on my laptop so anything thats get downloaded or uploaded get transferd. Oh and firewire is a no go. I have 7 computers in the house and they all need internet.

Most liekly you are running a 10Mbs ethernet network, rather than trying to highly an unnecessarily upgrade. Just make sute you are running CAT5E calbe and get 100Mbs ehternet routes and bridges.

That should still be enough for you, Gigabit on CAT5E and CAT6 is a very dirty process which will end up tying up your computer processors to decode the information.

 

[xms]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mfillpot Ok, DSL maxes out at 1.5Mbs, Cable at 3.6Mbs, even with calbe and a 100BaseT(100 Mbs LAN) at try bandwidth of 50Mbs you woul still have 46.4Mbs unused.

I was talking about shifting enourmous amounts of it between local machines.

Like, having a server with 1tb of storage and all of your dvd's on it, and a firewire link to your desktop machine.

 

[Lostnhell]

Quote:

Originally Posted by xms I was talking about shifting enourmous amounts of it between local machines. Like, having a server with 1tb of storage and all of your dvd's on it, and a firewire link to your desktop machine.

For enormous amoutns of data I would recommend optical also if going between floors you have to use optical or you will get massive corruptions and grounding problems on ethernet cable.