1Gbit definitely faster than 100Mbit on home LAN ...

I posted a week ago about wanting to go from 100Mbit Ethernet in my home LAN to Gbit in order to transfer files quicker within my LAN. The consensus from many here at the time was that it was a waste of time/effort/money since the PCI bus and other peripherals could not take advantage of the increased speed provided by Gbit, and that in fact, even 100Mbit was an overkill. Here is my old post:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=266348&highlight=wquiles

Well, I went ahead and upgraded to Gbit and the results show that going from 100Mbit to 1Gbit DOES in fact improves transfer rates. No, I am not achieving full 1Gbit, but I am achieving 300% faster transfers, which is VERY significant in my book. A transfer that used to take 9 minues now takes 3 - I am definitely happy

Here is the transfer speed with my 100Mbit/s Ethernet (all computers on LAN are at idle - network not being used). I am transfering a very large file (DVD Image, 4.4Gbytes) from my backup server to my dually workstation. As you can see, I am averaging about 70Mbits/s, which is not bad on a 100Mbit/s network.



I then installed my Gbit switch and Gbit PCI adapters. Deleted the file, and transfered the file again. As you can see, I am how at about 200Mbit/s - about 3 times as fast:


Leasons learned:
1) The PCI bus on a normal PC can handle 133Mbyes/s, which is about 1Gbit/s:
133 megabytes/second = 1064 megabits/s = about 1 gigabit/s
=> The PCI bus COULD handle Gbit speeds if data could be read/writen to the PCI bus fast enough.

2) I was definitely limited by my network speeds on the 100Mbit network. Now with a Gbit network, I am limited by the hard drives - that will be my next area of improvement.

3) Is it worth getting Gbit network equipment? In my opinion, YES, specially when the equipment is now so "relatively" affordable. This is what I got:

5-port Gbit Switch: D-Link DGS-1005D
PCI Adapter: D-Link DGE-530T

There was an earlier thread that I was involved in that covered this aswell:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=257070

It goes into the numbers a little deeper, but essentially, yes, it should make quite a difference. You are now limited by your harddrives. Unless you go and RAID-0 your server and your local drive, it's not going to get much faster than 200Mbits/s. (which, if you ask me, is a very nice speed as-is).

Glad to see someone here tried it and got some concrete results.

Very cool and interesting. Btw: can you post how much the router and PCI cards run?

Looks like the swtich is about 100 bucks, not bad really.

I got the switch and cards from Newegg:
$84 for the switch:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...-111-020&catalog=30&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=0

$28/each for the cards:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProdu...-127-134&catalog=27&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=0

Very nice and very good information.

I'm still limping along on a 10mb hub. I'm not sure if I'm lazy or cheap, but simply haven't upgraded.

I had asked the question of what to choose myself a while back on another forum. The equipment i was looking at was the same equipment you use. Glad to see that it made a nice improvement. Maybe i will indeed make the jump?

Hmm, maybe once my computers are upto Gigabit par I'll upgrae my network I'm just running a 10/100

I've been wanting to do a gigabit upgrade myself. My main rig has integrated gigabit and i would just need a card for my file-server. I currently have 270gb of data on my file-server that i will need to copy off and copy back on once i get my raid array finished.

My main problem is the cost of a switch. I'm only doing 2 computers and $84 is pretty expensive. I would just do a crossover cable between the two computers (gigabit) and just have them going to the (100mbit) switch like normal but that would cause difficulties getting the computer to use the connection i wanted it to when transfering.


either way, the ONLY limiting factor in my pc would be my pci busses.
i have a RAID-0 of WD raptors (2x 36gb) in my main computer and am working on a RAID-5 of WD 120gb (6x 120gb) in my file-server. (striping with parity for those who don't know) those will be some interesting transfer rates indeed.

What OS are you using on that computer drakaves ? usually it just knows which connection to use when it's doing something liek that.

xp on mine and win2k server on my file-server.