What is so good about Gigabit Lan?

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: MangoTBG
Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

probably.

i've seen cheap ata raid 1 setups that do over 100MB/s a while back, they were on ata 100 only too. maxing out gigabit bandwidth is probably within reach now.

 

[Pariah]

Gigabit ethernet in a standard PC would need ideal conditions to even approach half its theoretical bandwidth. You won't need RAID to saturate it. You don't wait to use something until you can saturate anyway. Hard drives are way beyond the capabilities of 100mbps ethernet, so regardless of whether you can saturate gigabit, you're still going to see a considerable boost in network performance by upgrading to gigabit.

 

[wetcat007]

Originally posted by: Tabb
What is a gigabit? 1000-Megabytes? So does that mean you have the transfer rate of 1000-Mb/s? In theory...

10 bits= a byte, 100megabytes a second, or 1000 megabits a second is what it means.

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle

Originally posted by: dexvx
Gigabit is mainly used for corporate backbones that need the bandwidth, eg servers. Its also for high speed workstations that need to transfer a huge amount of data back and forth on a regular basis. Gigabit isnt recommended for the home since there isnt anything in home use that would require the power offered by a gigabit network card. Intel has recently been testing its 10 gigabit adapters and switches to be used to further increase the speed of critical ares in the network. However, they wont see the light of day until about 2005.

If you're getting slow downloads, it is probably a driver issue. Since there are only 2 major companies that make gigabit NICs for now, Intel and Broadcom, its recommended you download the newest driver for either of them. You also have to note that the eariler revisions of "low-end" gigabit NIC's (netgear, linksys, etc) cannot sustain anywhere near their maximum speeds. Even the first revision Intel Gigabit NIC had a max throughput of about 40% of theoritical.

FWIW, the GigE chip on IS7 boards is a 3Com Marvell chip. And I disagree about GigE being useless in a home setting (even at only 40% of theoretical); GigabitE all the hard drives on your home network seem like local drives. This is great if you have a big HD on one computer but not on the others, or if your brother has a huge mp3 collection you like to tap into, or if you want to back up information across numerous drives (I like to keep a copy of my critical files on more than one drive).

Do you know if chip is 10Mb/100Mb/1Gb, or is it just 1Gb? I ask because everything except my PC is 100Mb. Do you know if goiing with 1Gb will cause a slowdown?

 

[Eug]

I've got 10/100/1000 LAN on my laptop. I've never used it either.

 

[Spac3d]

Originally posted by: MangoTBG
Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

That would be nice. I wouldn't mind trying that out at home to see how they react... would Windows give me a problem if I had 2 nics in each computer... one nice --> router and one nic --> other computer?

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: Spac3d

Originally posted by: MangoTBG
Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

That would be nice. I wouldn't mind trying that out at home to see how they react... would Windows give me a problem if I had 2 nics in each computer... one nice --> router and one nic --> other computer?

I've been wanting to do this with my desktop and laptop, except my current has no GigE. 100 Mbps is kinda slow for transfers of large amounts of video.
The new Mac desktop I'll get will have GigE though (and a high-bandwidth bus so I won't be saturating the bus with the GigE transfers).

Fortunately my Mac laptop has an autosensing port. No crossover cable needed when doing the direct hookup thing to any computer.

 

[Markfw]

I have a DLT8000 driver that I can backup my own IDE hard drive with this SCSI-3 tape backup at 20 gig/hour. If I backup one of my other computers on my 100 m-bit full duplex fully switched network, I get 10 gig/hour. So I can't see how you could even use more the about 200 m-bit in a network, unless you are running 64-bit PCI-X controlled SCSI raid arrays on all the computers on your network.

Thus a practical example to show why gigbit ethernet only provides value for business networks.

 

[sharkeeper]

Fortunately my Mac laptop has an autosensing port. No crossover cable needed when doing the direct hookup thing to any computer.

That's standard for all 10/100/1000 Mbps ports on NIC's and switches alike. Goodbye crossover cables forever! 🙂

-DAK-

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: Confuse
Regarding the IS7 and gigabit lan, I recently realized that wasn't in the specs. So whats the deal with people getting it on their IS7 boards? To me, this was truely bad because there is no FreeBSD driver to support this NIC. And I was sort of hoping on getting the 10/100 intergrated nic like I read in the specs files for driver support.

Most of the 2nd tier NICs dont have drivers for non-mainstream OS's or their performance on the respective platforms is very low. 3Com has fallen behind in the last 2 years, and would probably be considered 2nd tier by now.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: Pariah
Gigabit ethernet in a standard PC would need ideal conditions to even approach half its theoretical bandwidth. You won't need RAID to saturate it. You don't wait to use something until you can saturate anyway. Hard drives are way beyond the capabilities of 100mbps ethernet, so regardless of whether you can saturate gigabit, you're still going to see a considerable boost in network performance by upgrading to gigabit.

thats true. never see full 100mb/s out of my network🙂 overhead etc ig uess.

 

[trikster2]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I have a DLT8000 driver that I can backup my own IDE hard drive with this SCSI-3 tape backup at 20 gig/hour. If I backup one of my other computers on my 100 m-bit full duplex fully switched network, I get 10 gig/hour. So I can't see how you could even use more the about 200 m-bit in a network, unless you are running 64-bit PCI-X controlled SCSI raid arrays on all the computers on your network.

Thus a practical example to show why gigbit ethernet only provides value for business networks.

You can double the speed of your $5,000 backup solution for $200?

Great practical example of why gigabit ethernet provides value for a single user.

It' does not need to be ten times faster to provide value. Twice as fast will do for me.

 

[txxxx]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo

Originally posted by: Pariah
Gigabit ethernet in a standard PC would need ideal conditions to even approach half its theoretical bandwidth. You won't need RAID to saturate it. You don't wait to use something until you can saturate anyway. Hard drives are way beyond the capabilities of 100mbps ethernet, so regardless of whether you can saturate gigabit, you're still going to see a considerable boost in network performance by upgrading to gigabit.

thats true. never see full 100mb/s out of my network🙂 overhead etc ig uess.

Try ProFTPD via Internet Explorer on a local network...then you will 🙂

 

[thorin]

What is so good about Gigabit Lan?

The same thing that's sood good about a XP3200 vs a XP 2700 ... er whatever.

Thorin

 

[tweeve]

When it comes to gaming a Gigabit LAN would be the best if all computer ran at that. At my house I run 2 switches one 8 port in my brothers room where the main switch is, and a 5 port in my room where my computer and the Game Server that we just built is. Our bigest problem is that the transfer rate between the Switiches is only 100Mb/s. that can slow down a network when you Gaming with 2 computer on one switch and 3 or more on the other switch. Games like BF1942 when you are doing lots of Bots can really bog down a network. with a Gigabit network I wouldnt have so much trouble. but the probelm is that gigabit switches are just too much money at the moment 🙁

 

[Holmecollie]

Today gigabit internet could really only benefit us consumers (without paying loads of cash) in a few apps.

The only affordable switches I've seen today with gigabit only have one gigabit port and the rest @ 10/100. This kind of switch could be very useful if hosting a gameserver or something like that at a LAN - 10/100mbit is plenty for an individual user but the server would require more with all the simultanious connections.

Also data transfer between to gigabit computers has increased performance compared to 10/100... of course

Now of course it would be more beneficial if everyone in that Lan i mentioned would have gigabit connections but I wouldn't wan't to be the one paying for the switch...

 

[sharkeeper]

26 10/100/1000 switched ports for $199 is cheap IMO.

-DAK-

 

[BoberFett]

Not for 99% of the home users out there.

 

[redbeard1]

Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

Well yes, sort of. You would need cat6E cable to get closer to the max speed. We have a tester that can check the quality of cable signals, and there is a huge difference between cat5e and cat6e cables.

 

[tokamak]

Originally posted by: Spac3d

Originally posted by: MangoTBG
Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

That would be nice. I wouldn't mind trying that out at home to see how they react... would Windows give me a problem if I had 2 nics in each computer... one nice --> router and one nic --> other computer?

doubt that would be a big problem. i have 2 NICs. one nic --> dsl modem and one nic --> other computer for connection sharing. works like a charm

 

[thraxes]

Originally posted by: redbeard1

Could you, not, use a cross over cable from one pc to another pc, both w/ gigabit LANs and they'd, theoretically, be able to transfer above 10Mbps?

Well yes, sort of. You would need cat6E cable to get closer to the max speed. We have a tester that can check the quality of cable signals, and there is a huge difference between cat5e and cat6e cables.

That is the main reason why we use optical fibres for the Gigabit links from switches to the Backbone at out LANs. The cables in such an Ad-Hoc installation mostly run way to close to other cables that really interfere with the signals (Power, Video, Audio, other Network cables). We tried Gigabit over copper once... and only once! At an average we got 300Mbits out of the system which is very poor when 24 people have to share it. The cables were cat5E, we couldn't get enough 6E cables for a decent price in the required timeframe. Pure Gigabit goodness (There are over 1300 clients sending traffic through those backbones!)

For such extreme uses Gigabit is your friend but at home the usefullness is IMO limited. MP3s, AVIs and most other things you send over the LAN don't even fully need 100MBit. Where it also shines is in professional environments like at a publisher when dealing with huge DTP files or in a Video editing environment when transferring the material from one machine to the other.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

I recently ran into a situation where GigE came in handy.

Eight machines, all running a lot of networked apps/data.

Linksys 9-port switch. Eight ports are 10/100 autosensing. One is a 1G uplink port, and connected to the network server.

The 1G port can easily keep the other 8 pipes full. 🙂

- M4H

 

[odog]

we should have the mod delete all the people with bad numbers people are throwing out.

GigE or Gigabit is 1000Mbps/megabits. One byte is eight bits, for a megabyte rate divide by eight. 1000/8 = 125MBps. 125 Megabytes of theoretical bandwidth. actual bandwidth is lower, as has been previously stated.


GigE 1000Mbps, 125MBps, 125,000KBps
FastE 100Mbps, 12.5MBps, 12,500Kbps
Ethernet 10Mbps, 1.25MBps, 1,250KBps

again 1 Byte is 8 bits not 10.

Originally posted by: shuttleteam

Fortunately my Mac laptop has an autosensing port. No crossover cable needed when doing the direct hookup thing to any computer.

That's standard for all 10/100/1000 Mbps ports on NIC's and switches alike. Goodbye crossover cables forever! 🙂

-DAK-

yeah GigE is handy like that, i believe its due to the fact that it uses all 4 pairs on copper🙂 don't remember the details

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
I recently ran into a situation where GigE came in handy.

Eight machines, all running a lot of networked apps/data.

Linksys 9-port switch. Eight ports are 10/100 autosensing. One is a 1G uplink port, and connected to the network server.

The 1G port can easily keep the other 8 pipes full. 🙂

- M4H

perfect!