5punk

In the never ending quest for more speed I have a problem somewhere on my network....

I have 3 PC's that all have onboard gigabit nics which I believe are preferable to PCI nics as they use less system overheads. I have also used pci cards and I get the same results.

When I transfer any large (HD Movies, DVD/CD Images that sorta thing) files across between the 3 pc's they are only running at about 250mbps rather than 1000, I understand that there are disk read times etc etc to be taken into account, but surely I should get over 250mb?

Most of this data I've got through the network tab on Task Manager which I presume is fairly accurate.

Its 6 cabeling everywhere, and I had the same problem on CAT5e in my last house.

The Netgear GS605 has an internal bandwith of 10Gbps - I initially thought that perhaps it had an internal bandwith of 1Gbps split over the 5 ports which was the reason.

I know i'm not going to use 100% but I would be happy with 50% as currently

I'd be interested to know if someone can say they run gigabit and they get GB performance 5 times faster than mine. Or if someone can tell me that I've missed something and what i've got is correct now get out of here u noob.

Well, consider that the average hard drive can read/write about 60-90 MB/s. That's 480-720 Mbps, so you'll have a hard time saturating an ideal Gigabit Ethernet connection.

Also, you should make sure that the cables are properly terminated into the jacks (i.e.: the individual copper wires in the cable are all making good connections with the pins in the jack.

What OS are you running? Fista is notorious for slow file transfers, so that could be contributing.


I assume you know about the whole bits vs. bytes thing already so I won't go into that.

Have you tried a direct crossover cable? That would eliminate your switch to determine if that is the bottleneck.

I think both internal network cards & PCI network cards can be hugely variable.

What does CPU usage do when you are making a large file transfer? Some network cards have good onboard processors, others offload it to the system.

Remember that for gigabit speed, you cant use old-school PCI connectivity, as basic PCI will max out at 1067 Mbit/s or 133.33 MB/s
Some motherboard's internal ethernet will be connected with PCI, others with PCI-X or PCI-Express.


/edit

Oh and yeah, just to echo deject - hard drives won't reach gigabit speed anyway.


And pitty the soul who has to rely on Ethernet over power. I get a pathetic 10% or so of the 200 mbps the devices are theoretically capable of...

Well, consider that the average hard drive can read/write about 60-90 MB/s. That's 480-720 Mbps, so you'll have a hard time saturating an ideal Gigabit Ethernet connection.
Still way above what i'm getting, they are Sata II drives that I transfer between generally

Also, you should make sure that the cables are properly terminated into the jacks (i.e.: the individual copper wires in the cable are all making good connections with the pins in the jack.
I think they are OK, I was extra carefull, especially with the wall plates etc because i didnt want to take them out again.

What OS are you running? Fista is notorious for slow file transfers, so that could be contributing.
I have run Fista for a bit, and found the problem was the same, infact that was when I first noticed the problem, as it tells you the speed your transfering @ etc


I assume you know about the whole bits vs. bytes thing already so I won't go into that.
I know, megabits megaBytes etc, although I am arare of the difference in actual size per unit etc I get the B's and b's the wrong way round ALL the time.

I suppose it could be a culmination of all the above, leading to poor performance...

Have you tried a direct crossover cable? That would eliminate your switch to determine if that is the bottleneck.
Simple idea, I actually hadnt thought of that, I'll give it a go tomorrow.

What does CPU usage do when you are making a large file transfer? Some network cards have good onboard processors, others offload it to the system.
The CPU on both the gaming PC's stays fairly low, unless i'm transfering lots of small files which I guess makes sense. The CPU on the Server does hover around 20% though regardless of quantity of files etc. But then it may be having to deal with other requests on the network at the same time etc.

Remember that for gigabit speed, you cant use old-school PCI connectivity, as basic PCI will max out at 1067 Mbit/s or 133.33 MB/s
Some motherboard's internal ethernet will be connected with PCI, others with PCI-X or PCI-Express.
Although they are onboard they are PCI-Ex, or so the description in the hardware profiles would lead me to believe. I thought that you could use PCI as long as it is 66mhz(rev 2.1) rather than 33mhz because that has a higher bandwith than 1gbps throughput maxed? - I may have confused myself here lol!

Oh and yeah, just to echo deject - hard drives won't reach gigabit speed anyway.
I totally agree, not untill I can afford 2TB of solid state anyway lol


And pitty the soul who has to rely on Ethernet over power. I get a pathetic 10% or so of the 200 mbps the devices are theoretically capable of.
EOP was such a great idea but I just dont think it had the investment behind it since the uptake of wifi. Shame really because it solves ALL the inherent problems associated with any networking.

all of that especially the HDD thing.

Tried running fresh cables too? if only for tribbleshooting.

Also, assuming all your hardware supports it, have you tried enabling jumbo frames? that could help a bit.

I love the word jumbo.

Dog Pants wrote:I love the word jumbo.

you scare me.

Your system will only run as fast as the slowest nic, you need to go through a process of elimination to find out what is slowing down your system. It could just be a rouge nic card. Also update any drivers that might be needed.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:you scare me.