"build" a gigabit switch

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Patman

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apr 13, 2004
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If I filled an old k6 box with network cards 1000mbs flavor and ran some program you guys suggest could I make it into a sweet switch with like 64 megs of ram that would act as "buffer memory" for a switch? That sounds like it could get me lots of sweet transfers.
 
Patman said:
If I filled an old k6 box with network cards 1000mbs flavor and ran some program you guys suggest could I make it into a sweet switch with like 64 megs of ram that would act as "buffer memory" for a switch? That sounds like it could get me lots of sweet transfers.
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The shared PCI bus is limited to 133megabytes/second half duplex. You couldn't saturate 1 gigabit link even if you wanted to in that system.

You can run freebsd/openbsd and bridge between your 2 or more gigabit NIC's. Even the bridging in Windows XP could do the trick.

But to make this actually worthwhile, you'd need atleast 3 NIC's. With just 2 NIC's you could just directly connect the PC's together with the same cable.

Considering that 5 port gige switches are under $60 at Newegg, you may be better off just buying a switch and get full gigabit performance(If your clients can pull 1000mbit. Any regular IDE/PCI based system cannot.)
 
Patman said:
IDE hard drives even bottleneck the Gigabit ideals?
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Gigabit ethernet is 125megabytes/second. A single 74gb 10000rpm raptor can pull about 75megabytes/second on some read benchmarks. Add in a fragmented filesystem(files not placed on the drive sequentially) and you'll cut your throughput down considerably.

Most people with modern PCI bus computers see 300megabit/second on gigabit links.
 
20-30 Man lan here is my network setup.

My Wireless dlink router hooks into my main 16 port switch. The 16 port branches off into 2 8s on other tabes, and the 8 port gigabit hooks into the switch with 7 of its ports and 1 goes into my machine so I can server 700mbps to 7 users at 100 mbps each for maximum speed. I need them to run ISOs off my machine. I have raid 0 raptors and gigabit on this machine, things look good?
 
Patman said:
20-30 Man lan here is my network setup.

My Wireless dlink router hooks into my main 16 port switch. The 16 port branches off into 2 8s on other tabes, and the 8 port gigabit hooks into the switch with 7 of its ports and 1 goes into my machine so I can server 700mbps to 7 users at 100 mbps each for maximum speed. I need them to run ISOs off my machine. I have raid 0 raptors and gigabit on this machine, things look good?
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You would not get 700megabits/second total throughput. With 7 machines hitting it at once, you'd be lucky to pull 50megabit/second on each node. Realistically, you're looking at less. No simple 2 disk raid 0 setup can supply 7 continuous streams at 100megabits each. 7 heavy users will have your disks running all over the place getting data, slowing down access for everyone.

Now, if your they can get by with say, 10-20megabits per node at once with 7 users hitting it, you'll be fine.
 
If you want to server up 7x100meg connections at full speed (realistically about 85Mbits/sec is all you can normally get before you start getting serious packet loss) you need a serious professional [read: expensive] storage system, even though notionally your raptors can transfer at 75Mbytes (600Mbits/sec) each (realistically much less) even running two in raid 0 for the reasons alrox said will be nothign like up to the task. Try running 7 hard disk benchmarking tools on your raid array, all at once, doing random or even sequential reads, that ought to give you a good idea of what your array is up to.
 
nb- said:
If you want to server up 7x100meg connections at full speed (realistically about 85Mbits/sec is all you can normally get before you start getting serious packet loss) you need a serious professional [read: expensive] storage system, even though notionally your raptors can transfer at 75Mbytes (600Mbits/sec) each (realistically much less) even running two in raid 0 for the reasons alrox said will be nothign like up to the task. Try running 7 hard disk benchmarking tools on your raid array, all at once, doing random or even sequential reads, that ought to give you a good idea of what your array is up to.
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LOL...
i think that might do a little more than give him an idea....
i can see his hard drives frying now!
i got the chocolate and the grahm crackers......who has the marshmallows?....

on a serious note....they are all right....theres no way your array is up to that.
however...for most 'streaming' applications....50 meg a second is more than enough...so dont worry
 
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