Gigabit LAN and jumbo frames?

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timmur

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Oct 3, 2004
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I want to set up a gigabit LAN and use jumbo frames. I have an SMC 4 port unmanaged switch that supports jumbo frames and I have Intel gigabit adapters (that support jumbo frames) on the workstations (3). I have a Netgear RP614 router that is connected to a DSL internet connection. I'd like to connect the LAN to the internet, but I'm sure that the router doesn't support jumbo frames. Will jumbo frames present a problem? If so, how can I use them and still get connected to the internet?
 
I don't think the router will cause a problem. Just plug the router into the switch along with the computer systems and enable jumbo frames on each NIC. I have almost an identical setup and that worked for me.
 
Thanks. I read that some routers drop jumbo frames when they don't support them, that's why I was asking. I take it you're using jumbo frames? How's the performance?
 
IT depends on what spec the routers connection supports, if its only 10/100mbps, then it won't be using the jumbo frames, but when ever your computer needs to communicate with the router, it will be able to negotiate with it how big the frames can be, so I don't think you will have any problems.
 
timmur said:
Thanks. I read that some routers drop jumbo frames when they don't support them, that's why I was asking. I take it you're using jumbo frames? How's the performance?
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I never had any problems communicating with the router when using jumbo frames. The performance was spectacular when I had high end scsi on both ends. I was getting around 400-500Mbs actual transfer rates with 15k scsi drives on each end. Could have gone even faster with SCSI Raid but I didn't care quite that much. Now that the server is back on IDE drives the performance is still a lot better than 100Mbs but not even close to 1000Mbs, probably around 300Mbs. You have to remember that increasing the network speeds gigabit ethernet still leaves you will the bottleneck of the hard drives. You are limited by how fast the hard drives on each end can read/write the data requested.
 
You have to remember that increasing the network speeds gigabit ethernet still leaves you will the bottleneck of the hard drives.
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Which is exactly where I want it! I want the network drives to feel like a directly attached disk. I do tons of large file transfers across the network and they just take too long. Thanks to everyone for the replies. :cool:
 
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