I'm in the process of upgrading my network gear. I'm trying to make the decision between sticking with 100Mbit or whether to move upto 1000Mbit. I transfer quite a bit of data across the network, both streaming media and backing stuff up. I'll also be adding an additional hub \ switch in a separate area of the house (to where the adsl modem, main switch and machine are) which will have the backup machine, fileserver and domain controller on it. I don't know what to do, what sort of real life performace gain am I likely to see with average power machines? Have been looking at the 8 port SMC SMC8508T as it's only £90 but to be honest I have no knowledge of equipment from this manufacturer. Also would I just need one switch and then hubs for additional segments or would it be best to use a switch at each stage?
From what I have heard, you need about a MHz per mbit of network speed to utilise it properly ... dont know if I put that through properly, but what it means is that you would need around 1GHz CPU power to utilise GigE properly. GigE by itself can totally flood a PCI channel or whatever, making your system slower if there are other PCI cards around. Also unless you have a fast RAID array, you will be limited by the HDD speed in your transfers, although you might see some improvement from 100mbit. Switched are always better anywhere I think. A hub essentiall repeats incoming data to all outgoing ports I think. So each hub would be sending possibly unnecessary traffic to ports in your switch and could cause overall network to slow down. Anyway, I am not an expert on these matters. These are just my thoughts.
Well - it should be pretty simple math. I just did a file transfer that took 120 minutes. Had I moved both computers to the GB section of my network, it should have taken 12 minutes to do the same transer (theortically).
You might find better all round performance by getting a more expensive 100Mb switch over a cheap gigabit one. Streaming media only needs to happen a bit faster than the bitrate of the media being streamed. Backup is different. You could always schedule backup to happen when you're in bed or whatever, effectively takign up none of your time anyway. Is Gigabit worth it? Not in this case IMHO.
From what I can tell from the talk about the SMC switch I've been looking at speeds should be twice base 100 at the very least. The SMC switch supports jumbo packets as well. Decisions, decisions....
Well, now I am curious, so maybe tonight if I remeber, I'll time a long transfer over both and see what the actual performance is.
Stop trying to be a smart arse Gigabit performaces depends mostly on your network card. If you get a good one then overheads on your CPU will be lower and then you should be able to get about 60-70 mbps if the hard disks can cope.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be a smart arse. honest. I just can't see the justification in spending the extra money, although 60-70 mbps does sound nice . Are you swaying either way yet Jimbo? I'd be interested to see what the total cost came to if you did.
Unless you got a server with a 15k rpm SCSI-5 RAID array with lots of cache memory, gigabit isn't worth it in home-user situations imho. The reason for this is that a 'normal' home-user PC simply isn't fit to use the available bandwith. Sure it'll go faster, but it doesn't scale as one would expect. In my experience you'll get a performance gain of about 100-200%, in other words 1 time or 2 times as fast (so not 10 times as fast). If you already have a fine working 100Mbit network, i'd just stick to that. On the other hand.. if you're investing in new network equipment anyways, you might as well buy gigabit stuff. The difference in price isn't that big anymore, and that way you'll be ready for the future. 60~70Mbyte/sec isn't a realistic figure. There are not that many home-user harddrives that can keep that up on a sustained basis, especially not when writing. For a MP3 it'll go, sure.. but that's not why one would upgrade, since on 100Mbit a MP3 doesnt take much time anyways. It's for those bulky file transfers (like >100Mb) that one would buy gigabit, and in that case the harddrives will be the bottleneck.
ach, I figure, if you have the money to spend.. then go for it, you'll see some increases in speed and less time spent making coffee or looking for the bottle opener. On the othe hand, I wouldn't say anything faster than base-100 is sensible money wise unless you need a backbone between 2 switches. Which you're not gonna need in your house.... So yeah, it'd be nice.... but might not be worth the extra cash. Chris (wharrad) p.s.... who on these forums have never bought anything above the optimum "performance per pound" value?!?!?!
If you have lots of traffice on your network (ie, a backup going on between 2 machines and you and 3 buddies are playing a game over the LAN) on a regular basis then go for it. I don't think i've seen any gigabit routers yet, so no point in a gigabit switch when most of your traffic ends up going though a 10/100 router somwhere along the line. The only reason to go gigabit would be your futureproofing.
Did you manage to run any tests? That's what I've been thinking. My existing adsl modem, routing and switching is all being handled by one cheap box which I don't think is helping any... It will be running to another switch upstairs in my house that'll probably stay at 10/100 for a while. The routing will be handled by a Smoothwall \ ipCOP box and surely only internet traffic will be flowing through there anyway? Speeds there would be capped by my connection speed anyway.
if your setup would be liek this: Internet>router>gigabit switch>computers (all the computers hooked up the the gigabit switch and then a single wire going from the gigabit switch to the router) then you wouldnt have any trouble. but if you had computer A hooked to the gigibit switch trying to talk to computer B which was connected to the router, you would be limited to 100 Mbps.
i have a gigabit/wireless network in my house its great i can play games between computers at lightnign fast speeds wiht a lot of people hooked up(lan partys rock) and file transfer is fast(once i figure out how to configeu it i had it workin but then had to reformat one computer) but the computers both have gigbit intergrated into mobo athlon 64 3200+ 7.2k sata hdds and up and over around good computers i use a linksys 8 port gigbit hub really i love it because i use it a lot think if your really gonna use it all that much if so then get it
gaming wise you wont notice a difference bettween a 10/100 switch, an expesive 10/100 switch and gigabit. I have used all three. File transfers will max out your HDD which while most people are saying that gigabit is pointless because of this I will put forward a different point of view. How often do you change your network card? or switch? How often do you get a new HDD? Probably alot more often than a new NIC or switch. So gigabit will future proof you. Also Darkwise I hope you dont have a giagbit hub! if you do it must be horrible.
