10/100 vs 1000 network speeds

[Zak33]

Lo people

My old Man's (a dustman.. he wears a dustmans cap... no... back on track) network looks like this:

Newish Quad core with fast drives and 10/100/1000 netowrk card

Router (Linksys) 10/100 used as switch too

Older P4 machine with uber storage in it... 10/100 card.

He stores alot of his large movies and picture in the older machine, and it's a slow old transfer. If I were to upgrade his older machine to have a seperate net NIC with a faster speed, and maybe us a crossover cable to miss out the router, would it be alot faster?

[Jay]

cable the PC to PC via crossover do you mean?

[b0redom]

Yes it would be faster. How much faster depends on:

Jumbo frame support in the NIC + OS
Disk speeds
What protocol you're using

You will not see a 10x increase in speed.

[dangel]

On gbit lan the limiting factor is hard drive speed for me - i did it a while ago and it makes a heck of a difference for transferring large files.

[Zak33]

yes, PC to PC with a cross over.

HDD speeds won't change.. lets assume they're all 7200 RMP Sata or EIDE os they are....

Can hard drives easily flood a 10/100 network?

[Zak33]

Jumbo frame support in the NIC + OS
Disk speeds
What protocol you're using

You will not see a 10x increase in speed.

i'm ok with it not going 10x faster

XP Pro in both.. the 10/100/1000 lan is an Intel mobo, but I have no idea about Jumbo frame..

Protocol? Dunno!! TCP/IP?

[Jay]

I would say you will get over 100megabit/s out of it so it is worth it. Depending on the NICs, HDDs etc I expect you will see at least 300megabit/s

[Steve]

People are forgetting something:

If it's going to be PCI NIC, which on an old computer I have a feeling it might end up being, then you're limited to 133MB/s on the bus, which will get saturated by a 1Gbps NIC, were it not for the fact that the disk channels likely sit on it too, so cut that in half, then halve it again for the sake overheads and old chipsets being a bit naff, and you'll get maybe 200-300Mbps out of it.

So potentially a 2-3x speedup. So what everyone's already said anyway... heh.

[Zak33]

cool... willl sort for the old boy.. thank you all

[Steve]

Oh, and you probably won't need a crossover cable specifically - modern tend to NICs auto sense the wiring arrangement.

[dangel]

yes, PC to PC with a cross over.

HDD speeds won't change.. lets assume they're all 7200 RMP Sata or EIDE os they are....

Can hard drives easily flood a 10/100 network?

Yup, changing got me a substantial boost well worth the effort.

People are forgetting something:

If it's going to be PCI NIC, which on an old computer I have a feeling it might end up being, then you're limited to 133MB/s on the bus, which will get saturated by a 1Gbps NIC, were it not for the fact that the disk channels likely sit on it too, so cut that in half, then halve it again for the sake overheads and old chipsets being a bit naff, and you'll get maybe 200-300Mbps out of it.

So potentially a 2-3x speedup. So what everyone's already said anyway... heh.

Yup, it's cheap enough and enough of a gain to be worth doing, and that's all that needs to be worried about really.

Oh, and you probably won't need a crossover cable specifically - modern tend to NICs auto sense the wiring arrangement.

Now that I didn't know - interesting!

[edgars70]

My experience matches what Steve is saying.

I have an old Athlon 1800XP pc which is connected to a gigabit network with a gigabit nic that I use as my NAS (using freeNAS). It's disks are relatively new SATA drives. The network transfer speeds from my gaming pc to the athlon machine are roughly 20-25K. When I transfer files from my gaming pc to my htpc which is an intel dual core with similar disks, I get 40-50K transfer speeds.

Adding a gigabit network card would help a bit. However, if you bypassed your router, then the old P4 machine would not be connected to the internet without more tickering - that may be a good thing though.

[peterb]

Gigabit NICs are pretty cheap - and it certainly isn't going to run any slower - so worth trying anyway.

[kmac]

I also upgraded from 100 to gigabit LAN and it makes a heck of a difference to transferring files to/from my NAS server. So much so I've upgraded all NICs to Gigabit.

[oolon]

Gigabit switches are becoming dirt cheap now, even managed switches are becoming cheap, netgear do a web managed switch for the price of an unmanaged one used to be not long ago, and there "layer 2" gear has grown the ability to do "static routes", which I could have swarn was layer 3! Even if your old man only gets a 3 times increase in speed there arn't many upgraded for the price that could do it. Personally though I would not use a cross over cable, as addressing the computer by the wrong name/ip would use the slow interface, just get him a switch and have done with it.

[kmac]

Some 8 port gigabit switched reviewed here

http://www.meetthegeeks.org/Networki...?id=83&pid=315