Gigabit Ethernet addition to LAN

Anonymous wrote in part:

This should work fine. Unless your runs are long/poor, you should not need to replace cable.

Yes, but I don't think you'll achieve anything like

-- Robert

Might that be better stated as "with gigabit cards in ordinary PCI slots?"

It is my understanding that the 33MHz/32Bit PCI slots were a/the limiting factor and the Gigabit NICs themselves were in the last few years anyway) all at least 66MHz/64-bit capable (perhaps just 66MHz)

rick jones

Thanks for the help.

Of course, I would LOVE to get GbE speeds, but there are other limiting factors besides the PCI bus such as the speed of a single/non-RAIDed ATA HDs in my computers.

My realistic hope is to get a "significant" speed boost by going from fast ethernet on the LAN to GbE. Moving large files and backing up GBs of stuff across the LAN is quite time consuming at present.

What you're going to achieve is to remove the network as bottleneck. I suspect that even if the network is going at full gigabit speed you'll see less improvement in throughput than you expect.

Yup, that's the way to do it. I get about 200 megabits of bandwidth between the (fairly recent/powerful) machines on my gigabit segment, FWIW.

(snip)

Gigabit was designed for Cat 5. If you are approaching the length limit you might worry about using Cat5E or Cat 6, otherwise you should be fine. Say less than 80m or so.

One you might check on is that the switch and NIC implement flow control. It might be that your internet connectivity runs slower, if the switch fills the buffers and drops packets.

-- glen

Anonymous wrote in part:

How time consuming? What sort of bandwidth are you currently achieving, say in a large file xfr? If it's 10+ MByte/s, then your LAN may be limiting you. If it's slower, them most likely something else is the bottleneck. I often see different file transfer speeds in different directions, mostly likely due to OS/driver issues.

-- Robert

Yes.

Yes. The PCI bus has a burst bandwidth of 133 MByte/s, more than enough on paper for GBE. However, the bursts are of very limited lenght, and there is significant setup.

-- Robert