Need help with Gigabit speed

[RBBRMADE]

I recently purchased two 3COM 3C2000 NICs, and a Netgear GS108 switch.
I am not getting the speeds I was hoping for with the new hardware.

I am seeing 13 - 17 MBps with only these components connected. I have swapped cables to make sure I did not have one flaking out.

the 3COMs setup allows you to change the frame size, but it seems to not make much difference. It works at 9000, but no speed increase is noted. The default is 1500.

I also cannot locate any new drivers for the 3COM. The ones that came with it are from 2003.

Can anyone be of service?

Ron

 

[Madwand1]

There are two parts that could be underperforming -- the drive systems and the network (or both).

Typically you'd be limited by the drive transfer speed, so you'd need to find out this speed in order to determine your upper effective network performance limit. You can do this by copying files within one machine from one drive to another -- using an existing second drive if you have it, or by moving a drive from one machine to another temporarily. Ideally you should test performance in both directions in both machines in case there're some differences.

Typical figures for single IDE to IDE transfers are around 30 MB/s. You can get lower performance by having very crowded / heavily fragmented drives, among others.

When testing simple file transfers for performance, you also need to consider the effects of the drive cache. For numbers not affected by drive caching, you may need to reboot the machine or use very large files greatly exceeding the possible cache (RAM) size. You can also take advantage of drive caching to eliminate source drive speed in analysis.

There are a number of tools that you can use to test pure networking performance. A version of the open source TTCP for example. AT has used the old NT TTCP. I've used PCATTCP.

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2696&p=11
http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/pcattcp.htm