Gigabit lan??

I have two PCs with gigabit lan ports?

Do I need a special gigabit lan cable to gain gigabit speeds?

If it goes though a hub will it still transfer files at gigabit speeds?

Is it really that much faster say transfering 10gig of music will take 1/10 the amout of time???

For short runs the standard CAT5E will do fine.

If going through a Hub/Switch, it too must support Gigabit speeds.

And yes, it will be faster.
100Mbit = 12.5MBytes per second (actual speeds will be less because of overhead and hardware speed).
1Gbit = 125MBytes per second (again, actual speeds will be less).

On my 100Mbit network, between my two fastest computers, I've been able to get just over 10MBytes per second tranfers. For 10GBytes of data (depending on file size), that would mean about 16m40s. On a Gigabit network with say 100MBytes per second, that would mean about 1m40s.

Of course, your speed will be greatly limited by your hardware as well (besides your network card). I know when I copy a few gigabytes worth of data (3-5) from one drive to another, it usually takes over 2m. Thats on regular SATA with no RAID.

I believe Gigabits real purpose, is not only for future transfer speed requirements, but for today technology, allowing access of network drives or other hardware almost as fast as if the hardware was attached to your PC itself.

Agreed /\

I hate wireless, it never bloody works...

All I can do is see my neighbour's network all the time LOL...

it will be limited to by your hardware and other factors such as network and computer activity and amount of free resources but yes it will be faster as long as your switch/hub/router has gigabit

aja said:

Agreed /\

I hate wireless, it never bloody works...

All I can do is see my neighbour's network all the time LOL...

Click to expand...

I LOVE wireless! I have a router, and it rocks. I love it so much that I am going to make a smoothwall just for the fun of it!

I mean, I just plug in the wireless card, find my wireless, enter pass and there I go, the system is on the network and on the Internet.
No need for cables!

The only problem is that it is semi slow.

Mycobacteria said:

I have two PCs with gigabit lan ports?

Do I need a special gigabit lan cable to gain gigabit speeds?

If it goes though a hub will it still transfer files at gigabit speeds?

Is it really that much faster say transfering 10gig of music will take 1/10 the amout of time???

Click to expand...

Cat 5e is generally recommended, although might be able to get by with existing cat 5 over short runs if you get lucky. All new cabling should be cat 5e at least.

Gigabit generally supports auto-crossover, so you can directly connect two gigabit NICs with standard straight-through cables, and don't even need a crossover cable or a gigabit switch/router. This is a good way to test performance and evaluate going to a gigabit switch/router.

An example of an inexpensive fast gigabit switch is the D-Link DGS-2205. You can connect this to a 10/100 router with a standard cable, and then connect all the gigabit devices to this switch. The 10/100 router won't affect the performance of your LAN-to-LAN transfers, which will go from switch port to switch port, and not through the router.

As a rule of thumb, most people get around 30 MB/s Windows file transfer over gigabit. This is around 3x as fast as good 100 Mb/s, so is a substantial improvement for not much money. You can get faster transfers, but it's not easy because a number of new bottlenecks other than the network come into play when you go to gigabit and the network is no longer the primary bottleneck.