If I were to get a GIGe switch..

imported_goku

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Mar 28, 2004
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And assuming all the computers connected had GIGe on them, would communication between them be the equivalent of accessing a HDD locally? Because the bandwidth of GIGe should be higher than that of a HDD.
 

phisrow

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Sep 6, 2004
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Unless you have some really classy network gear, you'll, at least, see higher CPU load and access latency, quite possibly slower transfers as well. You would also bottleneck, potentially, if accessing multiple drives over the wire simultaneously. Depending on what you want to do, though, this may or may not be an issue. I know that some applications with scratch files specifically disallow working from network shares, for basically this reason; but you probably wouldn't even notice if you were using the remote drive as a media volume or something.
 

imported_goku

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Mar 28, 2004
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I figured, but it would be nice if I were working on a project that was ginormous enough to not fit on my current drive, I could just do the encoding on the main machine with the output file going to the file server. I wouldn't have to worry about the network being clogged when doing large transfers like this because there are a bunch of hubs (it's up-linked multiple times).
 

phisrow

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Encoding should be just fine. You'd probably want to get a niceish Gigabit card for your encoding box, just to keep contention for CPU time down; but I doubt it would damage your speeds all that much. Particularly as encoding is more likely to be bottlenecked by the high bitrate source, or the compression, depending on what sort of compression, rather than the lower bitrate output.
 

petey117

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Jul 24, 2003
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don't forget latency though... speed aside, latency would be much higher over tcp/ip than it would be over the SATA or PATA bus
 

imported_goku

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Originally posted by: JackMDS
In part a Giga LAN might pose problem since an optimize Giga LAN needs Jumbo frames which are achieved at a MTU of 9000.

However if the Network is used for Internet surfing as well MTU of 9000 would not agree with fast Internet.

Peer to Peer Giga Networks

Setting Peer to Peer Giga Network.

:sun:

I understand that GIGe bandwidth can't be fully utilized but when they say that a server coupled with some SCSI HDDs, they seem like they're implying that the network speed is limited by the HDD speed, therefore making GIGe perfectly viable. I can see how a network connection faster than the HDD would be because there would be room for it to grow. I've got at the moment Intel Gigabit adapters and I would like to be guided to a high quality switch.
 

Madwand1

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Jan 23, 2006
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I have a home gigabit network via a DGL-4300 router, which does not support jumbo frames. I've measured OK throughput between the computers, even when using gigabit via the PCI bus (whether on adapter cards or built into the motherboard). By "OK", I mean as low as 615 Mbps typical, and perhaps even as low as 350 Mbps between two old/slow computers / gigabit network cards.

On properly designed built-in gigabit ethernet, I get close to full 1 Gbps bandwidth as measured via network benchmarking tools.

That said, I find it very hard to get anything like full bandwidth usage when transferring files, despite using RAID arrays on both ends. While I'm usually able to often break the 100 Mbps (10 MB/s) fast eathernet bandwith easily, justifying the move to gigabit ethernet, I've yet to seriously use the additional bandwidth in file transfers, even when using really large (e.g. 100 GB backup file, etc.). And I see little CPU utilization at these times.

I think that disk write speeds are a big part of the bottleneck at the moment for me, and I have no idea why I'm getting crummy disk write performance on a 3-disk RAID-0 array. Something to figure out..

So at this point, I find that gigabit ethernet bandwidth without jumbo frames is not close to being fully utilized, and the dream of 100 MB/s file transfers (or anything close to that) is still just a pipe dream for me. Yet it's definitely better than 100 Mbps, and certainly worth trying / doing right, as the devices are not expensive and even common.