What transfer speeds to expect with cat5e crossover cable? Firewire network better?

SJetski71

SJetski71

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As the title states, i'm looking to bypass my 10/100 router/switch between my HTPC and main rig. I'm wondering if a bypass with a cat5e crossover cable will yield better transfer rates than through my standard 10/100 router?

The reason i ask is because i'm staring at 50' of cat5e crossover cable and about 5 10/100 network cards and it wouldn't cost me a penny to try it out. I'm just looking for feedback before i begin my little experiment.

On another note, would a firewire/1394 cable networked between the two be any faster? The two systems in question have nvidia onboard 1394 which bypasses the pci bus and 'theoretically' faster than a pci based firewire card.

PS, These two rigs need approx 30 feet of cable to connect, don't know how that may affect a firewire solution...

Thx a ton in advance, any knowledgeable answers may save me hours of learning 'the hard way' ;)
 
You should see very little diffrence, maby an almost unmeasurable amount of increased latency goign thru the swich as compared to going straight pc-pc.

As to the firewire, its rated to 400mbps correct? thats 4x faster than the 100mbps over ethernet. so, in theory it would be faster, but i've never played with firewire to tell you the truth.
 
Thx for the reply, I'll bench my onboard Nvidia 10/100 vs these other nic cards i have and see whats faster. I'll put my firewire solution on the backburner till i learn more...i just found out that its signal is good for about 15' then i would need a repeater: 2 x 15' cables + repeater = $$$

I wish gigabit switches would drop in price more, the pci gigabit cards are already pretty cheap. The Dlink gigabit switch @ $70 is pretty tempting but that whole endeavor would run me over $100 with the network cards combined...not willing to spend that disposeable income just yet ;)
 
your nvidia firewire is on your southbridge so it is still on your PCI bus

it may be cheaper to get a pair of 1000baseT nics and use a crossover if you really need faster transfer speeds
 
yeah, a pair of gigE copper nics woudl be cheap off ebay, you can get them for under $20 EA, I know that I have. Then you can use your normal old cat5E crossover, and have 2x the speed of your firewire network.
 
I am getting these speeds out of my system,
10/100 through a switch,
10-100-speed.jpg

Actually transfering files, I get 8megabytes/sec

and Gigabit with a straight cable,
giga-speed.jpg

I get 16megabytes/sec with the Gigabit.
 
Originally posted by FLECOM
your nvidia firewire is on your southbridge so it is still on your PCI bus

it may be cheaper to get a pair of 1000baseT nics and use a crossover if you really need faster transfer speeds
Click to expand...

Ahh, never knew that about the nvidia firewire. The idea with the dual 1000baseT nics sounds like a great idea. Newegg has quite a few low cost options. Are there any that i should stay from?

Thanx again to all for the helpful advice.
 
3Com makes good stuff, but your gonna pay a bit for them. Definenetly don't do linksys or D-link nics, they suck.
 
I am running the Netgear GA302T cards. Seems to work pretty good for me.
 
iperf.jpg


That's about as close as I can get. Two onboard BroadCom Extreme 10/100/1000 NICs through a Cisco 3750 GigE Switch. Increase the TCP window size. Windows is tuned for full duplex 100MB networks. You have to tweak it to get decent performance out of GigE.
 
969Mbits! nice indeed! :eek:
 
Originally posted by Goofball
iperf.jpg


That's about as close as I can get. Two onboard BroadCom Extreme 10/100/1000 NICs through a Cisco 3750 GigE Switch. Increase the TCP window size. Windows is tuned for full duplex 100MB networks. You have to tweak it to get decent performance out of GigE.
Click to expand...

How do you set the larger window size in Windows? I searched on googls and there were some references to Win2K but not for XP.
 
Originally posted by Goofball
That's about as close as I can get. Two onboard BroadCom Extreme 10/100/1000 NICs through a Cisco 3750 GigE Switch. Increase the TCP window size. Windows is tuned for full duplex 100MB networks. You have to tweak it to get decent performance out of GigE.
Click to expand...

:eek:

Holy crap...you MUST write a tutorial on that :D
 
Originally posted by Goofball
iperf.jpg


That's about as close as I can get. Two onboard BroadCom Extreme 10/100/1000 NICs through a Cisco 3750 GigE Switch. Increase the TCP window size. Windows is tuned for full duplex 100MB networks. You have to tweak it to get decent performance out of GigE.
Click to expand...

Why not show the IP addresses so we can see if they are going between 2 machines?
I can get high numbers on my slow machine running the server and client on the same PC,
gigabit2.jpg
 
Originally posted by PopeKevinI
:eek:

Holy crap...you MUST write a tutorial on that :D
Click to expand...

For this stuff there is no tutorial. It's all in the hardware. These are IBM xSeries 225 dual Xeon 2.4 HT CPUs with 1.5GB of RAM and a 64 bit backplane. The 3750 switch has a rated layer2/3 switching fabric of 32 Gbps. That is pretty far beyond a 200$ SoHo GigE switch and el-cheapo GigE NICs you might buy at Fry's or CompUSSR.

For GigE the main tweak is enabling Jumbo Packets (large MTU). Look it up. If your equipment supports it you can get some pretty good gains. There are some tweaks for a bunch of different OSes here as far as windowing and such here: http://www.psc.edu/networking/perf_tune.html

As for WS6's asking me to show IPs, not going to happen. This is a corporate network and security through obscurity is a good thing here. I will show images of the hardware however:

The Servers:

ServerRoom11.jpg

The top two in this image are the ones I was transferring between.


The Switch:
ServerRoom9.jpg


There are some other photos of this stuff at:

http://www.goofball.org/svrrm/

The 4x8ht-server.jpg file in that directory is a screenshot of the top server in the IBM rack. It is a quad Xeon 1.5 3MB cache with HT and 8GB of RAM. The rest of the stuff in that directory are the linked images and some others.

Phantom Edit: I will NOT be around for 5 days to answer replies after today. I'm headed to Bristol, TN to watch some jet planes in a gymnasium. (NASCAR rocks...)
 
I can post an outrageous speed as well,
iperf.jpg


This is a P4 2.66HT with 512megs of ram.

At least show us the last 2 sets of IP numbers so that we can see that they are different.
 
Originally posted by WS6
I can post an outrageous speed as well,
IMG Snipped...

This is a P4 2.66HT with 512megs of ram.

At least show us the last 2 sets of IP numbers so that we can see that they are different.
Click to expand...

I'm glad for you. This is not a penis size contest. I'm sorry that you feel it is necessary to turn it into one. I wasn't posting the original to show off speed, I was posting it to show that for GigE you have to adjust some of the defaults for TCP to get it to use the full pipe. There are plenty of applications that will still be compartively slow, even with this adjustment, most notably windows file sharing (CIFS) because they don't support the windowing adjustments.

I've attached two more runs from iperf, one from the same machines as last night and one with the client looped back into the same server. Past that I'm not providing anything else, take it or leave it.

Server to server across the GigE switch:
iperf2.jpg


Server looped to itself:
iperf3.jpg
 
Originally posted by WS6
I can post an outrageous speed as well,
iperf.jpg


This is a P4 2.66HT with 512megs of ram.

At least show us the last 2 sets of IP numbers so that we can see that they are different.
Click to expand...
What's your problem? Give it a rest.
 
Originally posted by Blitzrommel
What's your problem? Give it a rest.
Click to expand...

I have no problem, I just want to know if that is a real machine to machine speed or a fabricated one.
If it's real, I would like to know how to tweak mine to get it faster.
 
Originally posted by WS6
I have no problem, I just want to know if that is a real machine to machine speed or a fabricated one.
If it's real, I would like to know how to tweak mine to get it faster.
Click to expand...
Can't you just take his word for it?
 
Originally posted by Goofball
I'm glad for you. This is not a penis size contest. I'm sorry that you feel it is necessary to turn it into one. I wasn't posting the original to show off speed, I was posting it to show that for GigE you have to adjust some of the defaults for TCP to get it to use the full pipe. There are plenty of applications that will still be compartively slow, even with this adjustment, most notably windows file sharing (CIFS) because they don't support the windowing adjustments.

I've attached two more runs from iperf, one from the same machines as last night and one with the client looped back into the same server. Past that I'm not providing anything else, take it or leave it.
Click to expand...

I wasn't trying to turn it into a penis size contest, I just want to know how to get my machines to transfer files faster
Right now I have drives mapped from machine A to machine B and I only get about 16megs/sec when I copy files to and from the drives.
Maybe that is the speed limit of the drives or the settings I have for the network. Machine A has the Cheetahs and machine B has Barracudas.
 
Originally posted by WS6
I wasn't trying to turn it into a penis size contest, I just want to know how to get my machines to transfer files faster
Right now I have drives mapped from machine A to machine B and I only get about 16megs/sec when I copy files to and from the drives.
Maybe that is the speed limit of the drives or the settings I have for the network. Machine A has the Cheetahs and machine B has Barracudas.
Click to expand...

Potential bottlenecks:

Drive spindle speed
SCSI bus speed/saturation
SCSI controller speed (some are faster than others)
PCI bus speed (32-bit, 64-bit, PCI-X) and/or saturation
NIC quality/speed
switch fabric speed

And that's just in the hardware...

Anything older than Windows 2003 you can expect a loss of 10-20% off the top just to inefficiency.

As Goofball pointed out above, Windows is generally tweaked for 100 Mbps (I agree) and you have specific hardware that supports

You want to know how to get better speeds?

Go Linux or W2K3, and build a nice dual Xeon system with PCI-X, put an LSI RAID controller in it (last I heard, they were the fastest dual-channel on the market), and set up a great big RAID 10 with 15k rpm drives.

It'll probably cost you upwards of $10,000, but that'll get you speeds like you see above.
 
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