Whats the real world performance of 100baseT over 10baseT

[BillStuck]

I know technically 100baseT bandwidth is 12.5MB per second but how fast of speeds can you really expect on a home network with standard Linksys router?

I currently have a 10T system and considering the upgrade to 100baseT so I can access digital image files ranging from 1MB to 20MB from a file server.

If the speed is fast enough I can open them in Photoshop over the network but don't want to wait all day. Think the upgrade will allow me to work these size files over a home network?

 

[Paulson]

My network currently gets about 6mbps normally while my server gets 11mbps normally...

(this on a 10/100 network)

 

[kingbob]

Huge difference...10 MEGABITS (10baseT) has a theoretical speed of 1.25 Megabytes per second, although it never really hits that, usually around the 500k/sec range. 100 megabits (100baseT) has a theoretical speed of 12.5 megabytes per second but usually sustained transfers are about 3-4 megabytes per second. Hope this helps.

 

[Utterman]

With the sizes of your files and how often you have to access them, I would say that you would be able to get the files faster on a 100baseT

 

[Adul]

it makes a hug enough difference to warant it.

I am thinking gigabit myself

 

[Valinos]

100mbit is great. Go for it. I couldn't survive with 10mbit..bleh

 

[dszd0g]

I am not sure where kingbob got those numbers from. The numbers vary greatly by manufacturer, by card, by the computer they are in, by the quality and length of the cable used, and by the speed of the hub/switch used. Most Netgear 100bTX cards I have owned I have tested at almost 12MB/s one direction and around 20MB/s full duplex. At 10bT, the same cards do about 900KB/s one direction, and 1.4MB/s full duplex. Don't use whatever setup kingbob is using

If you have a demand for higher than that you can use firewire if you are just connecting between two computers running Windows XP (400Mb/s theoretical). Otherwise, you have to look at Gigabit. Most gigabit over copper I've benchmarked at placed I've worked has actually performed closer to half a gigabit , but that's still better than 100bTX. I've really been looking into it at home. A Netgear GS104 4-port switch runs a little less than $400, and a Netgear GA302T adapter runs about $60. I have one A7V8X which has gigabit built onto the motherboard, so that is one less adapter I would have to buy. I would only be able to have 3 computers on gigabit, but I could put my main machines on it. I could also buy a switch with a gigabit uplink port to connect to the fourth port for the rest of my machines. More than a 4-port gigabit switch is out of the amount of money I would spend on such an upgrade. Maybe I'll wait a little while longer to see if the price will come down some more (I'm sure it will, but I'm not sure how fast).

 

[BillStuck]

Originally posted by: dszd0g
I am not sure where kingbob got those numbers from. The numbers vary greatly by manufacturer, by card, by the computer they are in, by the quality and length of the cable used, and by the speed of the hub/switch used. Most Netgear 100bTX cards I have owned I have tested at almost 12MB/s one direction and around 20MB/s full duplex. At 10bT, the same cards do about 900KB/s one direction, and 1.4MB/s full duplex. Don't use whatever setup kingbob is using

Are you talking megabits/s or megabytes? because I picked up some 100bT cards last night and my network is defintely faster and my router/switch indicates 100bt in use but my top speed is consistantly @ 1.3Megbytes/s transfering a single 100MB file. From machine A to machine B the speed is allways 1.3megabytes but from machine B back to machine A the transfer is 50% slower everytime. @900k/s.

I know its not HDD transfer speed thats the bottleneck because the benchmarking program i'm using sends a 100MB file thourgh memory with not hard disk access at all.

Is this stil to slow? I think so..

 

[nightowl]

BillStuck: Are your cards set to Full-Duplex or Half-Duplex. Full-Duplex makes a big difference because it can send and receive at the same time. Also, do you have quality cables? Cables can make a big difference in transfer speeds. Typically when transfering large files I will get around 8-10MB and with smaller files 3-5MB. I think this is more representive of the true speeds that 100BaseTX is capable of. It is almost impossible to get more than 80% throughput on ethernet due to overhead of protocols and other factors.

 

[dszd0g]

When I write, I use:

MB = Megabytes
Mb = Megabits

The 12MB/s I gave was megabytes/s one-direction. That is the benchmark results I get, not the day to day. I guess I probably should have given a more day to day. But I can actually bench that speed using IP ICMP packets with less protocol overhead. Nightowl's 8-10MB/s for large files sounds like nothing to worry about. I will agree that Nightowl's speeds are probably more indicitive of real world. I just use the technique I use to test the quality of the setup.

I cannot emphasize how much Nightowl is right (and as I said earlier) about cable quality. I have seen cable quality make a 20% difference (cables I've crimped myself, generally off the shelf will have less variance than that).

1.3MB/s is definitely a bit low IMO.

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: Adul
it makes a hug enough difference to warant it.

I am thinking gigabit myself

Hehe, me too. I already have a Lucent Gigabit ethernet switch, just waiting on the affordable cards for my home network.

The difference between 10Mbs and 100Mbs is definately warranted, especially transferring large files. For an internet connection, until broadband in North America reaches South Korean level of penetration, then 10Mbs is all you need.

 

[zephyrprime]

I get about 89mbit with my XP network using Intel nics and a dlink switch. Used NetIQ to do the measurements. There was a big difference with the various network cards I've tried. Of the 4 different brands I've tried, Linksys performed the worse.

There's always gigabit if you have the need for speed. A Firewire network is a feasible cheap alternative.

 

[dszd0g]

Originally posted by: Thor86

Hehe, me too. I already have a Lucent Gigabit ethernet switch, just waiting on the affordable cards for my home network.

Oh, now that's a waste. The switches are much more expensive then the cards. I'd trade you three gigabit NICs for that switch

Although, I just checked and Dlink's 4-port gigabit switch (DGS-1004T) runs about $280. I generally don't buy D-link though, as I've found their stuff to be crap in the past. But for $100 less than the Netgear, even if it performs 20% worse than the Netgear it might be worth it, because it would still be better than the 100Mb I am running at now.