Network faster up than down. What what what?

[Shooty*]

M2N68AM Plus, for which the asus website is pretty good, but the problem is finding which driver is WHS compatible. XP, I plumped for.

When I go into the netwrok adapter properties, it goes up to 100Mbps full duplex as the max, with auto as the other option That didn't seem right to me, but the little pop up in system tray says "1000Mbps connection".

Edit: RTL8211CL Gigabit LAN

No driver that i can see on realtek site, but I'm guessing that customer satisfaction isn't actually one their Mission Statement.
Not much luck looking on Google, either: it's all crappy free driver download sites. And I don't trust Asus, much as I like them, to have the most up to date drivers. And I only want the NIC driver, not the whole chipset package.

Bah.

[Shooty*]

I'm gonna buy one of these:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Netge...1000-Ethernet)

Which seems to strike a nice balance between "cheap as chips" and "has relatively up to date drivers for XP/ WHS". I'll try it in the server, see if that makes a difference, and if not, I'll try it in the HTPC, and see if THAT makes a difference.

Tried the Laptop thing: the laptop onboard is only 10/100, so was inconclusive. Bah.

[oolon]

Personally I would buy the Intel PWLA-8391GT as there network cards are very well respected and have good driver support.

[Shooty*]

See, that's why I love Hexus.

[Funkstar]

Intel NIC's > anything else

Intel network cards have been the best pretty much forever. Well worth it if you are going to spend any money on a card. It will last as long as you get PCI slots on motherboards.

[Shooty*]

On order.

[Shooty*]

OK, nice and interesting result: True to form, Scan got the card and a nice shiny new Cat 6 cable to me within 24hours.

First, I tried the new cable. No appreciable result. Perhaps a little faster on the HTPC to server link.

So I put the new network card in the server, on a hunch that the problem was at that end. Nice new drivers from intel website.

BOOM.

Speeds equalised each way. I have found my bottleneck, and it was the M2N68am Plus XP drivers for the onboard LAN.

With the intel card, now running at 50 MBs each way (Is that right? I'm sure it said MB. I'll take a screeny later).

Now, to be honest, I'm tempted to get the same card for all other computers on the network, to see if that makes a difference. Or, realistically, is 50MB about as far as it's going to go?

Which, I suppose, is going to be dependant upon drive write speed, and I've not seen an HDD write faster than that, from memory.

[oolon]

Glad you liked the card, there was no need for a cat 6 cable as cat 5e has a band width of 1gb cat 6 has one of 2.5gb which is more than the card, though a sensible thing to check.

Now, to be honest, I'm tempted to get the same card for all other computers on the network, to see if that makes a difference. Or, realistically, is 50MB about as far as it's going to go?

Ok 50MB per second is 50*8 = 400 Mega BITS per second a gigabit card is a theorical 1 Giga Bit per second in each direction before overhead, PCI has a theoretical bandwidth of 1.06 Gigabits however it is a shared bus if your writing to a hard drive your only have half that as the data is going across the bus twice. Also the bus is 32 bits wide so you get rounding losses, which might explain poor onboard nic/drivers if they were say working in byte mode.

[Mblaster]

With the intel card, now running at 50 MBs each way (Is that right? I'm sure it said MB. I'll take a screeny later).

That sounds right, that's around about the speed you'll get transferring from one HDD to the other in the same PC so that's likely where the bottle neck is now.

Also, to be pedantic, I think you meant MBs per second (MBps or MB/s), otherwise it's like saying you're driving along at 50 miles, rather than 50 miles per hour, it's a size, not a speed.

[Shooty*]

Right, so that's a "no" from Oolon, and a "no" with added pendantry from mblaster?

Cheers, fellows.

[Funkstar]

I can get 60-65MB/sec when copying data to my storage server. Both built in gigabit Realtek NICs.

Just copyies about 9GB across and it fluctuated between 58 and 64MB/sec, although I am ripping a CD to the same partition I'm reading from.

[Shooty*]

Well... to be honest, mate, I value your contribution, as always, but I really expect something... extra now, y'know? I mean, can you out-pedant mblaster?

EDIT: and are you running WHS on the server or what?

[Funkstar]

See my sig for details, it's all in the Project Log