I now have a few rigs with onboard gigabit ports and I think it is time I start looking at replacing my no-name 10/100 switch. The problem is that gigabit switches are very expensive...But I found the Linksys Networking Gigabit 8-port Workgroup Switch at Dabs for less than £150...
Has anyone used this? Is it any good? Should I go for it?
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. - Batman costume warning label (Rolfe, John & Troob, Peter, Monkey Business (Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle), 2000)
Mmmmmm gigabit...
I dont think your hard disks will be able to write at anything above 100Mbps speeds? If that's the case then it's not worth it...
"All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so, they're stupid." - Bill Hicks
In my opinion gigabit is just not worth it for anything apart from large clustered DB's etc.
Your home setup just won't benefit from it.
TiG
I think you've gotten the two mixed up... Throughput on HDDs are between 50-100MB/s while a gigabit is around twice the speed of a typical ADLS connection.Originally posted by DaBeeeenster
I dont think your hard disks will be able to write at anything above 100Mbps speeds? If that's the case then it's not worth it...
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. - Batman costume warning label (Rolfe, John & Troob, Peter, Monkey Business (Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle), 2000)
You're right in your assessment of the usage of gigabit networks. However, I regularly transfer 300-500MB image files from one rig to another, so I think a gigabit switch / network will really help...Originally posted by TiG
In my opinion gigabit is just not worth it for anything apart from large clustered DB's etc.
Your home setup just won't benefit from it.
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. - Batman costume warning label (Rolfe, John & Troob, Peter, Monkey Business (Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle), 2000)
er, no mate that aint right.Originally posted by spikegifted
I think you've gotten the two mixed up... Throughput on HDDs are between 50-100MB/s while a gigabit is around twice the speed of a typical ADLS connection.
ADSL = 512 KILObits per second.
Gigabit Ethernet = 1024 MEGAbits per second
Gigabit Ethernet is 2000 times faster than ADSL.
"All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so, they're stupid." - Bill Hicks
Unless your hard disks can both read and write faster than 12.5 MB/second (the speed of 100 Mbit Ethernet) you will not notice any difference at all...Originally posted by spikegifted
You're right in your assessment of the usage of gigabit networks. However, I regularly transfer 300-500MB image files from one rig to another, so I think a gigabit switch / network will really help...
Sounds like you are trying to talk yourself into it
"All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so, they're stupid." - Bill Hicks
You got XP as your OS?
If so pull taskmanager up, start a file transfer and watch the networking tab - It's rarely saturated.
I agree with DBeeeenster that you're trying to convince yourself you need it.... (bit rich coming from a man with a rack full of the servers in the garage)
There's nothing wrong with future proofing
from a server perspective - it makes a huge difference, latency particularly.
Home network - don't know, I think you'll see a pretty small difference, but end of the day - is a second or two worth 150 quid?
Hmmm... Thanks for all the input...And yeah, I got it completely wrong on the ADSL vs. Gigabit calculation - not thinking straight at all...
Just been doing some checking. When I'm doing sustained transfer from one rig to another, it's using up around 60-75% of the 100Base network. The issues I've is transferring files to multiple rigs (I've 3 rigs as part of my render farm)... Even if the speed doesn't improve significantly, I figure that it would improve latency across the network... Is that right?
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. - Batman costume warning label (Rolfe, John & Troob, Peter, Monkey Business (Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle), 2000)
You might get a small increase in latency, yeah, but I think it would be fairly minimal - almost imperceptable actually.
I guess it's up to you if that is really worth 150 quid. Personally I'd wait until the price of the kit comes down, as it is going to have such a small effect on the overall speed of things. The 150 would be better spent elsewhere I would have thought...
"All our beliefs are being challenged now, and rightfully so, they're stupid." - Bill Hicks
I was looking at other gigabit switches and they're way out of my price range!! We're talking about £500 to infinity... So I was thinking - £150 seems like a bargain.Ok, it's unmanaged, but hey, I don't really need that kind of high-end features for my home network, right?
On a different note, you can check out my setup on my site (see sig). If you feel there's something I can blow £150 on, I'm all ears.
Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly. - Batman costume warning label (Rolfe, John & Troob, Peter, Monkey Business (Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle), 2000)
spike I'm going to be getting a Netgear GS104 - 4 ports is enough for me (they are all auto-uplink neway if I need more in the future) ... and I am pretty sure there will be a big difference in file transfer - how couldn't there be:Originally posted by spikegifted
I was looking at other gigabit switches and they're way out of my price range!! We're talking about £500 to infinity... So I was thinking - £150 seems like a bargain.
On a different note, you can check out my setup on my site (see sig). If you feel there's something I can blow £150 on, I'm all ears.
100Mbps = 10MB/sec transfer (in reality - 12MB/sec in theory) - which basically means it takes 500 seconds to copy a 5GB file across the network (which is 8 mins approx.):
5000/10 = 500
1000Mbps = 100MB/sec transfer which my current hard drive would find it hard to match - 15.3K (rpm) U320 Cheetah which bursts at 80MB/sec + and averages at around 50MB/sec + ... I only have one of these atm (but might get another one soon) so the situtation for copying that same 5GB file would be this:
5000/50 = 100 seconds or just under 2 mins (approx.)
This means that gigabit will be 5 times faster for me (best case scenario) ...
Note the other machine is capable of feeding data (reading from it) at the same sort of rate.
I'll have to wait and see, in reality, but for those users like spike with SCSI RAID configurations (I think he has IIRC) there will definitely be a tangible benefit when transferring large files across the network.
Even if it turned only to be twice as fast - a 100% increase in network speed is some upgrade!
Last edited by BlackSheep; 29-07-2003 at 02:38 PM.
If your looking for increased performance when rendering why dont u upgrade the computers on your rendering farm. Faster/Greater RAM, Faster CPU, and so on. Wouldnt this give better performance when rendering than the gigabit network. A gigabit seems almost wasted betweek 3 machines but if u can afford it then knock urself out
also - if you're net rendering 3dsmax, you may see a tiny speed increase - but it's going to be seconds rather than minutes - I'm running a farm of ten machines in my office on gigabit, and there was only a 5 minute speed increase over the course of the entire job (400 frames) which took a total of 37 hours.
i.e. rendered across 100mbit switch - had to move an errant light, chucked in new gigabit switch and left it alone for the weekend.
Neligible speed increase over all - network was more responsive, but ultimately made little or no difference.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
Reply With Quote
