got it working - now i have Gbit at home

[wquiles]

I am not getting the full Gbit (need to work on my hard drives now), but now my Ethernet network is NOT the bottleneck and I have basically trippled my transfer speeds between the PC's in my home LAN:

http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=269065

[dkitt10]

does that mean it goes at 1000 m/bs instead of 100?

[wquiles]

If you could feed the PCI bus data at that speed, then YES, the data transfer would reach close to 1000Mbits/s in each direction :)

Of course, my system can't feed data fast enough, and that is why I reach only about 200Mbits/s. Still, since I was doing 70Mbits/s with my 100Mbit/s network earlier, the improvement is pretty nice!

[everclock]

That 200mbps seems pretty low even for a 32-bit pci card. I'm guessing either you have other devices that might be saturating the PCI bus, or your hard drives are really old.

Another possiblity is that the quality of your cable is sub-par. Are you using AT LEAST Cat5e?

P.S. I know you said it was a hard drive problem, but I just wanted to throw some other ideas out there. You are using 32bit33MHz PCI right? What else are you running on your pci bus? What brand and size hard drives are you usin? What ethernet cable are you using? Did you crimp it yourself? (Beleive it or not, the cables rated Cat6 and Cat7(unofficial) are basicaly cat5e cable with high quality connectors and high quality crimips.)

[disk11]

If its in the 32 bit slot then 200 mb/s sounds about right, due to the bug in the 760MPX chipset that limits the 32-bit PCI slots total bandwidth to 25 MB/s.

If you could wquiles but the gigabit card in the 64 bit slot.

[wquiles]

On my K7D Dually I have the Gbit card on the 64-bit slot, but the other PC (my backup "server") is an old PC with only a plain 32 bit slot so that is the best it can do. Once I get faster drives on both sides my transfer rates should go up :)

[disk11]

Oh, ok.

Actually a 32-bit slot can handle a the full potential of the gigabit card, but not by much, so it must be your hard drives.

[wquiles]

I do have a RAID card available that I will use in the backup server to setup a RAID 0 array. I will measure and report if there is any improvement once I got that working. I can later do the same on my dually workstation to compare - I will do one at a time to make sure I know what is contributing to the changes :)