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Gigabit Network Hardware

A

aohellasux

Weaksauce
Joined
Aug 2, 2004
Messages
102
I need some recommendations as to high quality gigabit network cards and a gigabit switch with at least 10 ports. The boss wants to upgrade from 10/100 in the office (5 Windows 2000 Pro machines, peer-to-peer network), and we want to make sure we buy good quality parts that are going to last. I've looked at some Netgear parts on Newegg, but I'm just diving into this gigabit thing, so ANY suggestions would be appreciated.
 
just my 2 cents but make sure whichever switch you decide to use supports jumbo frame and has the backplane speed to actually get to gig to each port without oversubscribing the crap out of the switch... it's not much use to have an 8 port gig switch that can only do 2 gig across the backplane which means 75% of your ports will be in a blocking state all the time waiting to send their data. having a max MTU of 1500 bytes is also lame since it will drive up processor utilization crunching all those packets ;)

If you really need gigE to the desktop I suggest going with a quality Cisco or Procurve switch.
 
Switch: http://www2.newegg.com/OldVersion/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=17-111-030&depa=1
NICs: http://www2.newegg.com/OldVersion/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=33-106-105&depa=1

Honestly, unless you're doing some serious transfers between those five computers, and especially if you're using ancient hardware (over two years old), upgrading your network isn't going to do anything for your speeds. I'd bet $10 that your manager has no idea what Gb would mean for a five workstation network, but I do have to say that it's good to future proof so...game on man.

Let's do some really dirty number crunching though.

Typical desktop or tower computer has at least one or two PCI slots, this is a given. Those PCI slots operate on a 32-bit/33Mhz but, giving the ENTIRE PCI bus a total of 133MBps throughput. Things on the PCI bus include all IDE devices as well as anything that is currently plugged into said ports (audio, network).
From there, if you have a 100Mb network that can theoretically utilitze 100% of the bandwidth given to it, you're looking at a healthy 12.5MB/s theoretical transfer rate between devices. In the Real World you can expect eight, maybe nine when the planets are aligned in a stock 2000 Pro environment.
Take a 32-bit/33MHz NIC and throw it in, and the maximum transfer rate that you will ever see is 125MB/s. Of course this is highly unlikely given the fact that the total amount of bandwidth going to the PCI bus is 133MB/s, and since any IDE devices are directly on the PCI bus, the full potential of a Gb network will never been seen with simple desktop machines. Given that today's hard drives can max out at around 50MB/s, that's half of your typical PCI bus bandwidth, and the NIC you plugged has to transfer the same amount, let alone the destination machine would have to write said data at 50MB/s, things can get hairy in a short amount of time.

Is it worth it? Only for future proofing, and only when PCI-E NIC are far, far, far more prevalent for desktop machines. For now, 64-bit/66MHz+ PCI-X is plenty fast for Gb because the limitation (as in most every case of a machine being slow) is in the hard drives at that point...unless you're running some serious SCSI RAID 0 action.
 
The SMC 8516T has 16 non blocking ports with 9k jumbo frame support for $300.00. It's the only consumer level switch with jumbo frame support that doesn't cost a fortune.

I agree that Intel GigE nic's are the way to go.
 
Also remmeber your cabling, some of the new copper gigabit connections are suffering due to the patch cables being to short - ensure that you have at least 5m of cable (if not 10m) between the client device and the switch else you may find you get a form of echo in the cable signal which will ruin any transmission gain your 1GBit gives.
 
alrox said:
The SMC 8516T has 16 non blocking ports with 9k jumbo frame support for $300.00. It's the only consumer level switch with jumbo frame support that doesn't cost a fortune.

I agree that Intel GigE nic's are the way to go.
Click to expand...
Dell now has the 2716 for $269 which gives you 16 ports, a little manageability, and jumbo frames.
 
cyberjt said:
Also remmeber your cabling, some of the new copper gigabit connections are suffering due to the patch cables being to short - ensure that you have at least 5m of cable (if not 10m) between the client device and the switch else you may find you get a form of echo in the cable signal which will ruin any transmission gain your 1GBit gives.
Click to expand...
So for patch cables from a Gb switch to a 10/100/1000 switch in the same cabinet, I have to bundle up ~15 feet of cable between each device?

Post a link to prove this, please.
 
JonR800 said:
Dell now has the 2716 for $269 which gives you 16 ports, a little manageability, and jumbo frames.
Click to expand...

Nice, didn't know about the 2700 series yet.
 
It's actually 3 meters, which equals ~ 9 ft. I learned this in a goverment funded school. Not that that is saying much ;|.
 
In reply to feigned, This was the recomendation of the networking team at the university I work at, we have just upgraded to foundary core and edge switches, and during their installation they have discovered problems with short patch cables,
 
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