Upgrade To Gigabit Network?

Z

ZzBloopzZ

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 18, 2004
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I've been thinking of upgrading my network to Gb from 100MB. I transfer quite a bit of data back and forth from the fileserver which holds ~2TB of data. I noticed if I backup a full DVD @ 8x locally it takes just ~10 minutes. But if I burn data through the network from the fileserver it has to cache the data so it takes roughly ~18-20 minutes. If I were to upgrade to gigabit network would it take just 10-12 minutes?

Since an average 7200RPM 8MB hard drive transfers at like 40-45Mb/s... wouldn't that take full advantage of a 100MB network? After overhead and all I would assume it would be 80MBish or something. So would I see any real world performance gain with gigabit? Like I stated I transfer alot of files back and forth and would like to burn off many things from the fileserver. Not using RAID either.
 
Yes you would. I do a lot of transfers between my server and other machines. On average I use 17-25% of my gigabits bandwidth. That seems small, but it is still about twice as fast as 100baseT.

You need to get your numbers right. Hard Drives are measured in bytes and network speeds are measured in bits. So yes your hard drives are getting about 40-45 MB/s, but that is 320-360 Mb/s. To use my numbers of transfering 170-250Mb/s, that means I am getting 53-69% of my hard drives "max speed." Since my server is doing all of its server things (serving email, webpages, etc) that isn't bad at all.

Upgrading to gigabit would cut your transfer times in half.

BTW I am using one of the cheapest GB switches avaliable, the D-Link DGS-1008D. You may get better results with a better switch.
 
For a reference, gb and GB as with mb and MB are different things. Bit is network data rates, gigabit = 1000mbit/s. Hard drive rates are read in MB/s, not bit.

I upgraded to gigabit a few weeks ago, and moving around data is quite easy. So far, only my backup file storage is on gig, but it works fine. The highest I've peaked was around 750 mbit/s at a lan party pulling data to me from several sources. And did a crossover test pulling around 800mbit/s. Pulling full gigabit is rarely seen, unless its a backbone.
 
I was thinking about doing gigabit for LANs, but I first tried it with crossover between my two amd rigs. Peaked out at 500Mbps, I could maintain 300-400, cpu load close to 80%.

Im saving up some cash for a newer comcrap prolaint (or something similar) before I dare switch to gigabit.
 
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