GIGABIT LAN make a big improvement?

[jtsnow]

Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with
100baseT thats there now?
Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of
effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang
a GIGABIT LAN around it?
I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD
backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues
we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such.

Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and
router to the GIGBIT world?.

Thank for any insights

 

[o-chan]

Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with
100baseT thats there now?
Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of
effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang
a GIGABIT LAN around it?
I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD
backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues
we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such.

Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and
router to the GIGBIT world?.

Thank for any insights

Well, it depends on what you are transferring. Large files every day,
then sure, if you have the cash. In addition to the cards, gigabit
switches are maybe 2-3x the cost of 10/100 switches. Then you need cat6
wire, etc.

 

[petermcmillan_uk]

Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with
100baseT thats there now?
Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of
effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang
a GIGABIT LAN around it?
I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD
backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues
we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such.

Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and
router to the GIGBIT world?.

Thank for any insights

With Gigabit you will find that the computer processing power will be
the bottleneck. Gigabit will give you around 125mb/s (I think), and a
fast hard disks can't sustain half of that.

It probably will improve hard disk back up times, but it depends on how
much data it is. You may find that it's not worth the cost. With
online games the bandwidth used is negligable. My broadband net
connection is 0.5MB = 0.5% of bandwidth, and most games don't even use
half of that.

I don't know whether the kids are experiencing lag in the games though.
This isn't due to the bandwidth though. I suspect that Gigabit
ethernet would improve lag though (if they have problems with lag).

 

[ASI Industries]

that depend quite a lot on the gigabit chipset you use, i have tried two
gigabit cards so far and i am not impressed!

Netgear GA302T (Broadcom) 12mBps (forced gigabit is disabled in drivers).
Netgear GA311 (Realtek 8139) 15mBps.

 

[ASI Industries]

Sorry the GA311 does not have (Realtek 8139).

Netgear GA311 (Realtek 8169) 15mBps.

 

[Michael Thomas]

Will I experience significantly faster exchange on my home LAN then with
100baseT thats there now?
Is there a bottle neck limitation in the PC that limits the max amount of
effective throughput to the point where it wont make much difference to hang
a GIGABIT LAN around it?
I have 4 PCs on a home LAN I was considering doing this for to improve HD
backup times I do to a server and to help with other shared bandwidth issues
we are starting to see with the kids playing online games, backups and such.

Any thoughts to suggest if this its worth the trouble to swap out NICs and
router to the GIGBIT world?.

Thank for any insights

As another poster pointed out, if you go gigabit, the bottleneck will
be how fast your system can feed it, which means as HDD's/CPU's get
bigger and/or faster, you can expect better performance (can u say
future proof?). I also have a server, running Fedora Core3, and since
going gigabit my backup times have been cut roughly in half. This is
with a 160GB Samsung HDD on the windows machine and a SCSI software
RAID5 140GB partition on the server. I backup around 75GB compressed
in 58 minutes, which if I did my math right is around 22MBytes/sec.
The server is a AMD XP1700+ nForce2 IGP with 512MB RAM, and the
desktop is a AMD Barton 2500+ nForce2 Ultra400 with 2GB RAM.

I went with 2 Intel NICs and a SMC 8505t switch, which was the only
one I could find that did 9kbyte jumbo frames at the home office price
range, though I haven't played with that yet. Benefit with jumbo
frames is lower CPU utilization and therefore slightly faster backups.

So if you have 150-200 bucks to blow I'd say do it!

MT