Geek Talk - Networking.

[McRat]

I own a small business with about 10 computers networked together. About 9 years ago, I set up the network using 10/100 mb/s cards and hubs. I was told that the "gigabit" technology wasn't actually much faster due to HDD speeds and other overhead, so I didn't use it.

Well today I started to upgrade to 1000baseT (gigabit), and I did some testing. With the old 100baseT (100mb/s) it took 12 minutes to move the 2009 report files from one computer to another. After hooking up the gigabit stuff, it took 45 seconds. It hit a peak transfer rate of 25 megabytes per second with single large CAD files, with a low of 2.5 megabytes per second with large quantities of very small files (up from .5 meg/sec with 100baseT).

So 5 to 16 times faster. Not a small gain by any means. Why the gains were so high I don't know, in theory the gains should not exceed 10x, but they did. But even 5 times faster is very noticeably faster. Perhaps 9 years ago the gigabit stuff wasn't working well, or the 100baseT stuff I was using was crap. I also changed from chained "hubs" to a single "switch".

Now if I could just get the DSL service to work like advertised (180kb/s peak download speed???), I'll be firmly stepping into the 21st century, abeit 9 years later.

 

[Vrabel]

just think, in 9 yrs you'll wish it was faster.

 

[McRat]

I'm not much of one for "updates".

I am still using a 486/33DX computer daily for one of the machines. Think I bought in 93? when they first came out, $2000 for 1 meg RAM, a 40meg HDD, and a B/W monitor. Not even a mouse came with it. State-of-the-art at the time. The built-in math co-processor made it so darn fast that some software would not run on it unless you kicked the "Turbo Mode" off. It was a freakin' animal! Now it has less HP than a cellphone, go figure.

 

[Poltergeist]

Yeah 9 years ago gigabyte ethernet was in its infancy. With 10gig being used now the 1 gig stuff is pretty reliable and works as advertised or better. 10gig cable is a flat cable to help stop the crosstalk. And from what I understand not cheap. Soon it will be fiber to each computer without the need for copper. I like the fiber to my house!

 

[Fingers]

Now if I could just get the DSL service to work like advertised (180kb/s peak download speed???), I'll be firmly stepping into the 21st century, abeit 9 years later.

Update your DSL modem. Switching modems doubled my throughput.

 

[PhilsLB7]

I nine years we all may need more fiber anyway!

 

[403turbo]

Your "extra" improvement over the 100x is probably due to the change from hubs to switches. Switches allow one computer to talk directly with one other computer. Hubs act like a party line on a phone system, everyone talks to everyone and hopes that the info gets to where it's going. You literally have information bumping into itself and being dropped then needing to be re-sent. Your 100base system on a hub was running like a 10 base system. The more hubs in the system the worse the traffic jams and the slower things go.

I setup a small network/server at my business, gigabit switch, and NIC in the server and everything else is still 100base.