Fastethernet enough for home network drive

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Mccaula718

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Dec 11, 2007
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So i currently have a HTPC that is being used as a media server as well. It currently has 4 hds in a relatively small case(2 hds are ziptied to fit). I have a nice desktop that is connected via Fastethernet(antec p182) that i would like to put 3 of the hard drives in and use as network drives for the htpc. My question is fastethernet enough for this? I personally believe it will be but would like to ask other users opinions.

Also I have a CCNA so i'm not an expert but do not treat me like an idiot and say i need 10GB connections for my needs. I obviously know that is overkill.
 
Well honestly.. Gigabit would be best, as it is pretty much the defacto standard now days. Plus it is cheap, unless you want managed switches, etc.
 
Fastethernet is enough for just about everything you'll probably be doing, however if you're streaming large video files, doing backup, or transferring data it could become cumbersome rather quickly. If at all possible it might be worth investing in a gigabit unmanaged switch + NIC's + proper cabling. All could be done fairly cheap and it would prevent the network l(dr)ag before it happens.
 
Liger88 said:
Fastethernet is enough for just about everything you'll probably be doing, however if you're streaming large video files, doing backup, or transferring data it could become cumbersome rather quickly. If at all possible it might be worth investing in a gigabit unmanaged switch + NIC's + proper cabling. All could be done fairly cheap and it would prevent the network l(dr)ag before it happens.
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Agreed, for now it will be sufficient.

As people often plan for only streaming music or films to one HTPC at the beginning, it often goes to adding a second media center and more and more clients, streaming full HD videos, etc etc.

My advice is to go with gigabit wire, do whathever you want after. If you need to upgrade to gigabit someday, you will not have to re-wire all your setup.
 
It will work, but for the cost of gigabit I'd just go with that. 100mbps is so year 2000. :p It's nice to overbuild things. Still run cat6 though, at least if you do decide to go gigabit you just need to change the equipment, not the wire. Cat5e will work too if you have it on hand, but if you have to buy it may as well just buy cat6.
 
Do gigabit. There is no reason to not go gigabit. They money saved is minimal unless you find some free switches.
 
I recently had to move back from gigabit to 100mb and its fine for streaming HD files etc but it's a real pain for moving large files around.

example is I needed to move 195GB of files, It took 5 hours! It probably woudl have taken about 30 minutes on my old gigabit network
 
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I think I'll purchase a cheap gigabit switch off newegg. I use my ceton to stream to my 360 in the bedroom so gigabit would be ideal i guess. thanks
 
Fast Ethernet is limited to 12.5 Megabytes/second, which is probably insufficient for a lot of HD video.

Gigabit Ethernet is limited to 125 Megabytes/second, which will work with most HD video (not RED generated RAW I don't think, but all regularly encoded 1080p content).

You can get a 4 or 5 port Gigabit switch for under $30. No reason not to do Gigabit.
 
10/100 is fine for streaming but it is a real pain if you need to move files. My old NAS didn't have drivers for my gigabit card so it was running all my media and iscsi for my ESXi server.
 
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