What in the world is G-E good for?

[Erehwon]

So lets see.. Gig-E sounds great right heck 100mb sounds wonderful? Well here is the problem (as I see it)...

We currently have 10mb, 100mb, and now 1000mb ethernet.

Question is simple.. Since we never reach the physical limit of 10mb ehternet (has anyone EVER downloaded or transferred a file at 10mb/s) let alone 100mb, what the heck 1000mb good for ?

Fastest I have ever see is using a cross over cable between two PC's and getting speeds of around 1.5mb's. I have heard of faster speeds but still nothing ever approaching 10mb/s.

I know there is some physical limts to the actual cable but what gives? Why make a "faster" rated cable if we can't even take advantage of the the "slower" versions?

 

[Cogman]

Ahh, another uninformed customer. the problem is your thinking of megabytes, but in fact those speeds are rated at megabits. There are eight bits in a byte. so you do the math. Windows mesures transfer speed in bytes btw.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Cogman
Ahh, another uninformed customer. the problem is your thinking of megabytes, but in fact those speeds are rated at megabits. There are sixteen bits in a byte. so you do the math. Windows mesures transfer speed in bytes btw.

Every architecture for the past <big number> years has used 8 bits in a byte.

Anyway, as cogman said, you're confusing Mbps with MBps (bits vs bytes). 1.25MBps is about the max that 10Mbps can support (ignoring overhead).

 

[Spencer278]

I've gotten around 9 MB/s downloading over my college network.

 

[Cogman]

Woop, Sorry Im wrong your right. 8 bits (though 16 sounded wrong somehow..)

 

[AnthraX101]

I've gotten well over 2 megabytes/sec just over a regular FTP connection (Woo Internet2!), which would saturate a 10mb network. Now keep in mind that your switch has to go to the next switch some how. If that's over a 10mb/s link, you are just splitting that much bandwith between all the users. This is where gigabit ethernet really shines. It's probably a little overkill for normal home users, but 100mbs is not unreasonably large for a home network. (Single switch/hub)

AnthraX101

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Gig-e is useful for a home network, since it essentially allows you to access any network drive as if it were local. If you share a lot of data (particularly large files) the speed difference between 10 MBps and 100 MBps (or whatever your hard drive's max transfer rate is) is very appreciable. The speed difference is akin to burning a DVD at 8X vs writing to your hard disc.

 

[silverpig]

Yeah, I notice the difference between 10 and 100 quite easily on the home network.

 

[AFB]

You should see 10gig over copper

 

[ss284]

Both 10mb and 100mb ethernet networks can be as good as 90% efficient, depending on other equipment used. Most of the time I see files transfering at a good 1MB/s and 8-9 MB/s over the respective interfaces when nothing else is being done on either of the pcs.

As for gigabit ethernet for the home user, its useless for most networks. 100mb/s is good enough for almost any home use. No common compressed media format even comes close to saturating a 100mb network if it were to be streamed for playback. The only time when 1gb/s ethernet might be useful is when a lot of file swapping is done across the network(such as video editing). Seeing as the average harddrive in a pc can write at about 20 MB/s , thats the fastest you will ever be able to transfer a file. This is still a good two times faster than what 100mb/s is capable of, which is a decent performance boost. Granted if you had a nice setup on the two pcs, such as raided raptors on an ich-5r and a CSA connection, the performance increase would be even greater.

The real usage of gigabit networks is in large corporations. Since everything is networked, 100mb/s isnt enough for a modern fileserver to serve 10+ people. While 100mb ethernet would be fine for each individual pc, when multiple pcs access the same server, the network connection becomes the bottleneck. Since scsi raid arrays can easily exceed sustained 100MB/s transfer rates, gigabit networking doesnt seem that useless anymore. Thats why fiber/10gb connections are used for high end servers, since gigabit actually becomes the bottleneck.

-Steve


-Steve

 

[Chaotic42]

You can *easily* use 1Gb/s of transfer bandwidth in a non-home user situation.

Easily.

 

[AsiLuc]

Don't forget universities who sometimes send data at 10 GigaByte/sec.
We need it! If not now, definitely in the future..

 

[Pandamonium]

You generally create standards and specifications for protocols well in advance of when the hardware saturates current specifications. It's just a more efficient way of progress in the computer world.

I get 11MB/sec on my 100mbit wired ethernet and ~5MB/sec wireless at school. The researchers there need the bandwidth. I know our medical school was moved to another network because of its bandwidth needs.

 

[imported_devnull]

Lets see some real world scenarios, to prove the nessecity of such high speed links.

There is a company with 50 employees, each one with each own PC connected on the company's LAN. There is a server (or a farm of servers), hosting the company's main database systems, mail server, http server, file server and so on. Also there are one or more network attached printers to cover the printing needs of the employees. Finally all these connect to the internet, and let's assume over a X Mbps link.

Can you identify where possibly one would need high speed links?

One could argue that if the employees do not occupy themselves with some very bandwidth hungry apps (like video) no one could possibly need a faster than Fast Ethernet link. But what about the link connecting the server farm with the rest of the network? What about the links connecting the servers with the other servers? You may see that this network could become easily congested if all components operate at bandwidths as low as 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet links.

 

[TerryMathews]

gigE is the fastest, cheapest, simplest computer-to-computer interface you can buy. There's no other way to move 125MB/sec between two computers using eight wires.

Of course, to hit 125MB/sec, you'd need on-chipset gigE (i875) or PCI64/66 and compatible adapter. That and a Cat5e or Cat6 crossover cable is all you'd need.

USB 2.0 transfer cables (Do they exist?) should be good for 40 to 50MB/sec. SCSI can go as high as 320MB/sec - yes, SCSI can be used for networking. Firewire could get close...

 

[Mday]

Gigabit ethernet's original intension was not to connect one pc to another. It was meant as a backbone type connection. that is, you have a switch on every floor of your office building. each of those switches would be connected to each other via gigabit ethernet. and each computer can connect to the switch on its floor via 100BT. That is why some switches only have ONE gigabit port, and several 100\10 ports.

Now, what happens if you happen to have several servers in your office building? well, you connect those to the network via gigabit.

now, let's take into consideration an office that has outgrown gigabit ethernet. yes this does happen, especially if you are in a business where simulations are made. you connect everything via gigabit ethernet. and perhaps even something faster.

one person does not need gigabit ethernet. it is a system that requires it. a system being an office with some 100 people accessing servers. now, let's take the worst case scenario, all 100 access the same server at a given interval. if you have 100BT, each person gets 1Mbps, that's NOTHING. if you have 1000BT, each person gets 10Mbps, that sounds better to me.

do not think in small terms when you consider technologies at work. it's not about YOU because companies dont make money from YOU the individual.

 

[Peter]

Three words: Local. Area. Network.

In a local client/server network, 100 Mbit/s connections are easily saturated, 1000 Mbit/s links improving performance rather drastically.

Sure, on Wide Area Network uplinks, there's hardly the need to go 100 Mbit/s from 10.

 

[TerryMathews]

Originally posted by: Mday
Gigabit ethernet's original intension was not to connect one pc to another..

I know, but it's a very useful feature.

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: TerryMathews
gigE is the fastest, cheapest, simplest computer-to-computer interface you can buy. There's no other way to move 125MB/sec between two computers using eight wires.

Of course, to hit 125MB/sec, you'd need on-chipset gigE (i875) or PCI64/66 and compatible adapter. That and a Cat5e or Cat6 crossover cable is all you'd need.

No crossover cable needed, gigE is fully auto-switching.