Slashdot Mirror
Gigabit Networking for the Home?
The Clockwork Troll asks: "I've had a whole-house audio/video distribution project on the back-burner for a while now. As gigabit networking hardware prices come down to earth, I'm tempted to jump on the 1000BaseTX bandwagon. As far as I can tell though, the current crop of consumer-priced hardware/software doesn't address a couple key issues, namely: fragmenting jumbo frames for the benefit of legacy clients - this is critical as some of the devices on my network will not tolerate the 9000+ byte Ethernet frames which are needed to get the most out of gigabit; and OS support - do Linux and Windows require much tweaking to take advantage of gigabit? Will most drivers automatically optimize themselves? A Google search didn't reveal too much consensus, especially on hardware choices. What switches and software configurations have Slashdot readers been using for home gigabit networks, in particular mixed ones (100/1000BaseTX?"
Check out the 8 port Asante GX5-800P. You can find them for ~ $160.
If you have 100BaseTX with 1000BaseTX you will take a big performace hit. I worked in a data center that had to be converted to 100BaseTX because not all devices are offered in 1000BaseTX and the conversion between 100 and 1000 is a big performace problem.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
In Mac OS X, there's a setting right in the Network Preference Pane that is under "Ethernet" and it allows you to scale up the packet size depending on the immediately aparent network appliances. I haven't been able to use this feature because:
A: Some clients have nice network hardware, but legacy copper
B: Some clients have gig copper, but not enough hardware
I can't wait to see the transfer rates on Gig with Jumbo packets though. *Drool*
I got nothin'.
I've got an Abit motherboard with Intel gigabit built in and WindowsXP loaded on it. My GF has a Powerbook with gigabit built in. We bought the cheapest gigabit switch we could find. We got Cat 6 cable.
:-).
Everything was autodetected and the speed improvement over 100mbit was dramatic. Highest performance increase I've ever gotten for doing basically zero work (I did plug in the cables all by myself
Now, this obviously doesn't answer all your questions, but for anyone out there who doesn't have legacy issues all I can say is go for it, it's a no-brainer.
BTW, I use a Linksys WAP-Router for internet. It didn't so much as burp when we plugged it into the gigabit switch.
TW
I think the biggest thing about gigabit is that PCI isn't really fast enough to support it. You can shovel 133MB/second over a PCI bus, or 1064Mb.... very slightly more than a gigabit, but that's with NOTHING else happening on the bus. Generally, since the hard drive controller is also on the Southbridge, I think about the best you're going to get off most PCs, even very, very fast ones, is about 300 megabits sustained.
To really take advantage, you're going to need machines that run the network card off the Northbridge. Presumably, PCI-Express network cards will also keep up pretty easily. From what I can see, you're probably best to wait another year to eighteen months before upgrading; by then, PCI-X should be pretty common, and gigabit networking shouldn't be very expensive.
Note that I don't have any direct experience with gigabit: these are just back-of-the-envelope calculations. I could be completely off, so pay attention to replies.
No tweaking required.
I have a mixed network and have not had any problems with speed or the switches flaking out.
I have 3com gigabit cards in three computers and a 3com 100Mb card in one.
One gigabit machine is a redhat 8 machine that is used as the network attached storage (NAS) box feeding media throughout the house and acting as the DNS for the house (This is so much faster than relying on your ISP!) and to filter packets for the kids computer (Damn Pr0N!)
One gigabit machine is my personal desktop.
One gigabit machine is in the family room sucking media from the NAS.
The 100MB machine is upstairs and the kids use that one.
The gigabit machines are plugged into a LanReady gigabit switch that I bought for 60 bucks Ebay.
The 100MB machine is plugged into a 3com superstack.
Both switches are then plugged into the cable router.
Speeds between the gigabit machines average 50 Meg a second depending how large the files are and if it's streaming or copying, The 100Mb box pulls 7-8 MB a sec from the others.
I'm happy with the speed.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
No, really. I'm serious. Not at home, anyway.
Unless you get a very hot, brand new PC with motherboard integrated gigE, your PCI bus can't push the bandwidth. The same goes for switches. You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.
Even if you have a $5000 gigE switch and a PC that can handle it, what are you going to talk to, your cable modem? The only place gigabit ethernet makes sense is when you are aggregating traffic from multiple computers to a centralized server or set of servers, and are using applications that actually require that kind of bandwidth. Even if you want to move that much data around, and have a way to do it (hint - neither scp nor samba can talk that fast), the best benefit you'll see is about double the performance you get with 100.
Here in the networking world (where I live and play), recent advances in traffic management systems have begun to punch holes in the time-worn theory that throwing bandwidth at a network problem = fixed. If you really want network performance, go check out the Linux advanced router/ traffic control site. (lartc.org) There, you'll learn to get lightning response from ssh and your first person shooters, all while running a 2gig/month web server through your home dsl's 256K uplink. And it won't cost you a dime.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Gigabit pipes are needed for stuff that can actually utilize it, like when you have 100+ servers needing to be backed up throughout the day to your SAN, or when you are serving out 600-800GB from your SAN to your servers. This is why you find gigabit pipes at the core and throughout the datacenter, but not from your workstations to your switches. Not yet, anyways.
Tests using PCI Gigabit chips (e.g., broadcom, 3com, intel) get around 500Mbps or so.
/. story! Of course, that controller is attached to the processor by a 6.4GB/s link!
Intel CSA attached gigabit chips (on Intel chipset motherboards only) perform better. CSA is a dedicated link from the northbridge to a gigE controller.
Of course, nForce3 250Gb integrates gigE inside, and gets over 800Mbps performance. See the preceeding
Also, PCI-X != PCIe. PCIe (PCI Express) is the upcoming high speed serial version of PCI that operates on a point-to-point basis. PCI-X is the extended faster variant of 64-bit 66MHz PCI running at up to 133MHz (1GB/s PCI essentially) in a bus configuration.
This is the major point that is overlooked when people talk Gb networks. Only with PCI-X slots do you see a major improvement in performance, and I would doubt that a home network contains even one PCI-X slot.
once you get around the IDE or SATA, the audio, the USB2 or Firewire (if we're talking video editing) etc etc etc, you would be better adding another standard network card and teaming them for your major data stores in the network and leave everything else as it is.
Also on a side note a 1 X PCI Express slot is ~250MB in each direction (about ~500MB total) so yes a 1 X PCI-E slot will do Gb ethernet fine
Normal people worry me!
When a TCP connection is established both sides report their MSS.
If one end is "normal" ethernet it will only report 1500 btyes (while the Jumbo frame end will say 9000).
The jumbo frame comp will send 1500 byte packets because that is what the other end asked for, and the "normal" comp will send 1500 byte packets because thats it's interface's MTU.
In other words TCP will handle it for you, stop worrying about it.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
We use GigE fiber for our server networks, and pass up between 400Mb/s and 600Mb/s on high traffic days from each one.
The one thing I can say is that you'll probably never use it. There's really no need at this time. most protocols aren't any good at sucking up that much bandwidth on a single stream.
I've had many people prove this to me. They'll transfer files as single transfers. They can use up to about 10Mb/s. But if they transfer lots of files, they can use lots more. Try it through a switch that you can monitor bandwidth on. Through FTP, SMB, SCP, or whatever, you won't use up 100Mb/s. But, running multiple concurrent sessions, you can try to come close.
Heroinewarrior has a library called "firehose", which uses up all the available bandwidth, and will stripe across multiple connections to use up more. So, if you have 3 100Mb/s cards in a machine, you can come close to transfering at 300Mb/s.
You should also consider the other factors. Can your machine really send that fast? Is your hard drive fast enough to send over 100Mb/s ?? A nice fast SCSI drive, or a SATA drive can do it, but most IDE drives will fall short (specs be damned, try it in real life).
I transfer stuff around on the GigE lan all the time. We do exceed 100Mb/s, but it's usually with multiple machines.
The highest bandwidth usage machines we have are voyeurweb.com . They send out 150Mb/s through TEQL (Linux kernel option) combined 100baseTX cards, with several copies of thttpd running.
thttpd is a web server that is very small, and works very efficently. Apache has one process per connection, but thttpd has one process for everyone. Well, at least theoretically. It was around 80Mb/s of regular web site files, that it started flaking out. So, we run 4 copies of it on seperate IP's and let it scream.
As for our network, I'll outline our largest network.
We have a 1Gb/s uplink to Level3. This goes to a Cisco Catalyst 3508 (8 GBIC ports).
The remaining 7 GBIC ports go to 7 switches, mostly Cisco Catalyst 3550-48 (48 100Mb/s ethernet, 2 GBIC), and the servers are attached to the 100Mb/s ports. We have one Dell switch, which does 1000baseTX on all the ports, and a few machines with 1000baseTX cards. They can't pull anything resembling 1000Mb/s between each other. it simply doesn't happen. Honestly, doing transfers through http, ftp, or scp doesn't ever use over 100Mb/s on individual transfers. Sure, we can do it with multiple concurrent transfers, but at home, how many hundred or thousand users are you really trying to supply?
For home, you'll never use it. 100Mb/s is usually overkill. I set up my house with 802.11b, and at 11Mb/s peak, I see no difference than my old house, where we had copper run to every room and a Catalyst 2924 managing it. 11Mb/s is more than sufficent for a home network.
Spend your money on a *GOOD* 100Mb/s switch. I highly recommend Cisco, like a 2924, which you should be able to get relatively cheap used. Even if you put GigE cards in the machines, you can at least monitor your bandwidth now, and see what you really use. If you start flat-lining at 100Mb/s (bandwidth graphs make things really obvious), then you could consider upgrading.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
You said it. I've been working as an in-store vendor rep in the networking aisle at CUSA in Norwalk, CT. On the rare occasions when the store employees venture over there (They really only care about big sales. PCs, TVs ipods etc.), half of what they spout out is utter garbage. Heard one of them tell somebody exactly the same thing, except in relation to 802.11b vs 802.11g. On a residential DSL connection, it doesn't make a difference. I try to keep that kind of thing from happening as much as I can.
It's 1000baseSX or 1000baseLX
Use 1000baseLX, have a GigE connection to friends and family miles away.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
On a 100BaseT NIC the theoretical max transfer rate is 12.5 MBps with a realistic speed of 8 MBps. Multiply that by 10 to get a rough estimate of Gigabit speed. Most ATA HDD's can transfer around 40-60 MBps. You can easily saturate a 100BaseT network with bargain basement machines.
Gigabit Ethernet is faster than what your typical ATA drive will absorb, but it is still going to be quite a bit faster than 100BaseT.
Spend the Money on a nicer HDD or a decent RAID setup and you will be able to make full use of a Gigabit pipe.
A friend of mine just went nuts when he found out about a new switch from SMC, the SMC8508T. While it's unmanaged, it offers non-blocking architecture across the entire line as well as support of jumbo frames up to 9K, which is extremely unusual for SOHO stuff. Not even a lot of expensive Cisco stuff does jumbo frames. And he paid $150 for it.
Why should you care about jumbo frames? I found this nice guide about that here.
-R
> Anyway, 100Mbit is cheap enough that you could always just install that first and then expand if you need more.
I'd agree with this.
I live in Aspen and deal with high end residences. Most of our clients have high end stereo and theater systems with a web based control system. There are touch screens in every room that handle music, tv, lights, window shades and many other things. They don't generate a whole lot of traffic on the network, but they're there.
Some also have music servers that run a custom software that displays ID3 tags, coverart, and playlists all on these touchpads (and remotes).
All of this stuff plus the kazaa traffic their kids are usually running don't ever lag the LAN. (Worms can be a different story, however...)
More people are having DVD streaming systems installed now and they're not killing the network, either.
Anyway, I just don't think the necessity for Gig is there yet and it'll be cheaper to switch them out later.
Heck, you'll probably buy new computers that will have Gig cards in them anyway before you'll need a Gig switch.
$0.02
T
Sales people are generally clueless.
It seems like almost every time I'm standing around in the computer department looking at networking hardware, a clueless customer is asking a clueless sales guy about stuff. The sales guy will say something stupid, and I'll correct him. Then I'll help the clueless customer save a bunch of cash, helping him with what he needs, rather than what they wanted to sell him.
Who cares if he didn't spend a bunch of cash. He's a *HAPPY* customer now, knowing he got the right thing.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
There's a company called ServeSoft (they have a weird url that I can't remember at the moment) that does exactly what you're looking for. They have ServeSoft branded Gigabit switches that are a great value (12 ports for $110 I think). I bought some things from them, but not anything fancy (I just needed to get video from my home server to a single home theater PC, not multiple machines which I gather is what you need). Beware though, they don't have a return policy for working items. I'm glad I liked my stuff and didn't get stuck with it.
The least expensive switch I have found that support jumbo frames are from SMC, the SMC8505T http://tinyurl.com/3by3v and the SMC8508T http://tinyurl.com/nhaz. The links are to the smc site. The 5 port version is approximately $100-120 and the 8 port is $140-$150. SMC also has 16 and 24 port versions. As far as support for Jumbo frame support Windows 2000/XP and Linux both have them as long the NIC has drivers that support them. I know the major NIC manufacturers like Intel, Broadcom, and 3Com have driver support for them. One tip: if you are using Dells with Intel 1GigE embedded on the motherboard make sure to use the latest drivers from the Intel support site since the default Windows drivers from Dell do not show the Jumbo frame option. As far as the optimal Jumbo Frame size, that would depend on the type of traffic you are carrying. Simply putting in 9K frames on everything might not be optimal. It will take some experimentation to find the right sizing.
That is why Intel i865/i875 has the option of direct connect e1000 gigabit (CSA) to the northbridge. Most motherboards with gigabit built on that uses either of those chipsets use the e1000 CSA gigabit chips.
I always thought that Cat 5 will not be sufficient for Gigabit speeds. It should be atleast 5e or greater.......
Umm "Dude" no it doesnt .ca division
AVGas is typically has a 100 Octane rating (r+m)/2
Jet A, Jet a-1 and Jet b run from 100 - 130 Octane ratings
Fightercraft effectively run kerosine aka jet a-1 with additives at 130 Octane+ ratings. so I don't know where you buy your fuel but if you are snagging 100+ octane rated fuels let me know 'cause I will increase the compression on my STS or add a paxton centrifugal supercharger and come visit. For more information on fuel grades check out our friends at the Royal Dutch Shell Oil company's
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
The Screen Savers did an on-air demo of 2 pairs of identical machines (hard drives, processors, RAM), one pair with 100 NICs, and the other pair with Gigabit....
They were transfering files between the pairs, and on a 500 MB (roughly) movie file, the Gigabit was done transfering in about 1/5 the time.
It was enough to convince me that I wanted Gigabit in my home. So far I have the Cat6 wired to 4 rooms of my house, all ending in my coat closet. Next I need to purchase a router. (My Dells came with on-board Gigabit)
We use an HP Procurve switch, and it has blades you can put in to add different functionality. Now, we have a 100Base network, though our Netapp needs 1000Base. Since we were ordering it, we picked up 3 1000Base cards for the Procurve, and no throughput depreciation. If you're willing to pay the cash for a Procurve in a datacenter, along with the cards, that's the way to go.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
PCI is MegaBYTES per second. So, PCI is capable of 1330 MegaBITS per second.
I know all that! I was replying to the original post which was talking about standard PCI and low throughput, and I was giving some real world figures to his speculated figures, and explaining that gigE is available already on motherboards in non-PCI limited versions (Intel CSA, nVidia integrated, etc). I also corrected the common statement that PCI-X is PCIe.
PCIe graphics cards will be 16x from the start. It looks like 1x, 4x and 16x will be the common configurations (and not 2x, 8x and 12x which are the other options). 1x gets 250MBps in each direction (more than enough for a discrete gigE controller), and 4x will get 1GBps in each direction.
Another thing to worry about with GigE is that each frame recieved needs to send an interrupt to the cpus. If you increase your interrupt throttle on any card with decent drivers, you take more cpu power but also get increased performance.
With 100MBit networks, the performance hit of these interrupts are negligible but that's not the case with faster networks.
Jumbo frames should help with this but even on a network with all the same high end Intel cards and all the same SMC switches, we still saw drastically reduced network performance when they were enabled. I don't think they work at all the way they're supposed to between different vendors.
The Intel e1000 drivers that we use in linux started auto adjusting their interrupts with the 2.6 kernel and we found that it resulted in shitty performance. By manually tweaking the InterruptThrottleRate option on the module, we got the best bandwidth to performance ratio. It seems like Intel probably tunes their drivers to work best under sporadic activity though, while we needed performance for long periods of high load.
Of course, I only have experience with the e1000 cards so YMMV.
Is it an EG008W or a SD2008? Linksys makes 2 different 8 port gigabit switches now. The first one they came out with is in their old clasic case design (EG008W) and the other is a new model in a new case (SD2008). I read somewhere the EG008W has a fan. I'm interested in knowing if the SD2008 has one too.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Likewise the 2.4 GHz devices in your home (microwave, 802.11 networking, cordless phones, etc) all use radio waves in the 2.4 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 cycle/s range.
Computer storage is the oddball here. 1 Megabyte is 1024 * 1024 bytes not because mega == 1024^2 but because it's easier to design computers with powers of two in mind.
Communication equipment on the other hand uses the standard meaning of the terms.
I always thought that Cat 5 will not be sufficient for Gigabit speeds. It should be atleast 5e or greater.......
You just can't get as much distance out of Cat 5. I am pretty sure Cat 5 will do gigabit up to 100 meters, Cat 5e will make it 350.
PCI is MegaBYTES per second. So, PCI is capable of 1330 MegaBITS per second.
:-)
Huh? What bytes are these?
% units -v 33Mhz*32bit megabit/second
33Mhz*32bit = 1056 megabit/second
% units -v 33Mhz*32bit megabyte/second
33Mhz*32bit = 132 megabytes/second
I also opted to mirror the media instead of going the backup route, Since I set the backups as a cron that runs when I sleep, I'm not aware of the time it takes copy the updated files. According to little meter on gkrellm, I'm getting about 10-12 MB/s thoughput (oddly I sometimes get a reading that says it's copying at 14.1MB/s. A friend claims explains that the reason why this is greather than 100Mb/s is because of compression at the NIC level) and this is roughly confirmed with howlong it takes to copy a 1.1 GB feature:
patrick@pappy > time cp pirates_of_the_caribbean_xvid.avi ~/ real 1m54.645s user 0m0.230s sys 0m17.740s [~/media/movies/] patrick@pappy >
Boy this turned into a bit of a tome.
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem /etc/samba/smb.conf
For a switch I went with an 8 port SMC EZSwitch 8508T. I chose it since:
1. It supports jumbo frames. According to my testing it will pass ethernet packets up to 9212 bytes which should correspond to a 9198 byte MTU.
2. It doesn't have a cooling fan. A definate plus since in my experience the little fans in switches such as this can become quite annoying as they age.
3. It comes with rack mount ears.
4. It's affordable. I purchased it from Securemart.com for $139.31 shipped. Ordered it Thursday or Friday, it arrived Monday or Tuesday.
As to NICs, one of my PCs already had an Intel gigabit port on the motherboard. In addition I purchased 4 more Intel Pro 1000/MT Desktop Adapters. Since:
1. They have good driver support on both Linux and Windows.
2. They support jumbo frames. Supposedly up to around 16000 bytes.
3. They're supposed to be pretty fast/efficient. It's kind of dated but you can find a comparison of some 32-bit gigabit NICs here.
4. They'll do 66Mhz if your motherboard supports it and of my systems does.
5. They have DOS NDIS2 drivers so I can use Ghost to make/restore images over the network.
One I purchased through Intel's evaluation program for $35.31 shipped. As I recall it took over a week to show up. The other three I ordered from OnlineMicro for $28 each plus $11.32 shipping. Be sure to change the shipping option from ground to 2 day air if you order more than 1, it's cheaper. They shipped them out the day of my order and they arrived on time.
One of the Intel NICs died about 4 hours after I installed it. I swapped it with another and the replacement has been working fine for a few weeks now. I ran the diagnostics on it and other all but the link test passed. When the OS is booted up the switch shows no link lights but sometimes when the PC is off the link lights do come on. I've also tried it in another PC where it exhibits similar symptoms. I haven't yet contacted Intel about getting it replaced.
I spent a lot of time tweaking various things. Some findings:
1. With default SO_RCVBUF sizes a MTU in the neighborhood of 4000 or so bytes seems to get about the best network/application wide throughput. Specifically the otherwise fast NF7-S system below would lose almost 50% throughput with 9000 byte MTUs with the default SO_RCVBUF size. Linux to Linux lost around 30% as I recall.
In theory you can change the default SO_RCVBUF size on linux by echoing appropriate values to:
Other than that you appear to have to change this setting in each individual application. One application of note that allows you to easily make this change is samba. See your:
2. If you crank the SO_RCVBUF size up to 200ish k or more then a 9000ish byte MTU can eek out another 5ish percent more bandwidth. Thus for the moment I've decided to just stick with 4076.
3. MTUs that are not of a size of the form 8x+4 cause Linux to behave oddly when it performs path MTU discovery. Namely for jumbo sizes that don't fit that form the discovery decides that the PMTU is 1492. You can read more detail about it in a Usenet post I made here. I still don't have a good picture of what'
Gigabit Ethernet actually uses the same frequency (100MHz) as 100Mbit ethernet. Cat5 and Cat5e is both rated for 100MHz. Actually, I wonder if you can get Cat5 but not Cat5e any more. When I wired my house, Cat5e was the minimum spec being sold.
The difference with Gig-E is that it uses all four pairs in the wire (100Mbit only uses 2 pairs) and it has a different linecode that allows more bits per baud.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Ok, here's the deal with jumbo frames.
Don't worry about them. Only very, very expensive systems will be able to take advantage of them.
If you have 32/33 pci, you arent going to get max throughput from GbE anyway. I've managed to get around 90mbyte/sec using ttcp, which is about 750mbit/s.
Because the hardware does all the work for you (hardware checksum, interrupt mitigation, etc). the cpu usage is very low even at that rate. And thanks to polling, the interrupt rate isnt an issue either.
Your bottleneck will be your PCI bus, plain and simple. You arent going to get the full 132mbyte/s from 32/33 pci, period.
Unfortunately 64bit/66mhz PCI motherboards are somewhat expensive and 64/66 cards are 3-4x the cost of 32/33 ones.
Framesize is a function of hardware capability.
If you have legacy 10/100 devices that are plugged into that segment, jumbo gigE frames will NEVER work with the legacy devices. gigE frames appear to be L2 MAC errors as the preamble, source, destination, length addressing may line up in the front of the frame, but the crc at the rear will never line up. (Ethernet II frame illustrated below)
Preamble|Source MAC|Destination MAC|length|data|CRC
This is exactly like MTU's not lining up.
But anyways, I think there are demonstrations with some workloads saturating a gigE w/o using jumbo frames.
[snip] from http://sd.wareonearth.com/~phil/net/overhead/
Gigabit Ethernet with Jumbo Frames
Gigabit ethernet is exactly 10 times faster than 100 Mbps ethernet, so for standard 1500 byte frames, the numbers above all apply, multiplied by 10. Many GigE devices however allow "jumbo frames" larger than 1500 bytes. The most common figure being 9000 bytes. For 9000 byte jumbo frames, potential GigE throughput becomes (from Bill Fink, the author of nuttcp):
I have a linksys 8 port gbe switch. I do largish (100-4200mb) file transfers between 2 machines with Intel desktop gbe cards and 3Ware ATA RAID cards w/ 5400rpm drives.
No tweaking, went from ~10-12mb/s to 20-24mb/s switching from 100 to 1000. Lots of variations between Linux and Win2KPro, and I had to move my Linux system to +1Ghz to get decent speed from samba. But worth it to me. Speed was measured with Win2k perfmeter or timed so YMMV.
I'd suggest not going with the Linksys because it has a cooling fan.
I've been using GbE for home LAN for about a year now. Here's the hardware I use:
h ttp://yoda.uvi.edu/InfoTech/rj45.htm
Switch:
Linksys Instant Gigabit 10/100/1000 8-port switch
I think I paid ~$200 for this.
Cards:
Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop Adapter (~$50 ea)
Use the e1000 driver in 2.4.x or 2.6.x.
Netgear GA302T Copper Gigabit Adapter (~50 ea)
Use the tg3 driver in 2.4.x or 2.6.x
The tg3 chipset runs rather hot, the e1000 is tiny and runs cool. I havent noticed a performance difference between either, and both chipsets run fine regardless of whatever PC I put them in.
Motherboards with embedded GbE typically use e1000 (if theyre good), or realtek (if theyre cheap).
Jumbo frames:
See my post on that here.
Cabling:
Hand crimped cat5e. Works fine. One interesting note about GbE, you no longer have to worry about crossover cables -- the GbE spec requires that devices autodetect crossover. You can make all your GbE cables "straight through" cables.
Do pay careful attention to following strict T568 wiring code though. You can no longer get away with incorrectly wired cables which just happened to work for 100bt. Since all pairs are now used in GbE, your wiring order must be 100% spec.
Here's some wiring guides:
http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5E.asp
When it costs $10 for a switch and $5 for a NIC.
Till then, the only time my 100mbit LAN gets remotely taxed is when I run Bacula backups of all of my machines.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I had no idea Gb Ethernet switches had dropped so much in price. If I was buying a new switch today I'd definitely be buying one of those $100 Linksys switches.
No you wouldn't be buying a Linksys, because they and the others in that class do not support Jumbo Frames, thereby diminishing one of the best features of GigE, and increasing the interrupt requirements on every one of your GigE NICs by a factor of... well, more than enough to make a sizeable performance hit -- someone else can do the numbers.
I was hovering over the "Add to Cart" button on the Linksys two days ago -- I noticed how CHEAP they are now and wanted to get rid of the crossover between my primary box and my 1/2TB RAID5 box used for audio/video). Thank goodness I did a little more research. I would have been really pissed to buy a 'Gigabit Ethernet Switch' that didn't support Jumbo Frames...
FYI, the SMC 85xx series switches DO support Jumbo Frames, and at almost the same price point. I don't know why Linksys, D-Link and Netgear cheaped out on Jumbo Frames support in their firmware/hardware. Pretty lame if you ask me.
But not as lame as Amazon.com taking off the SMC unmanaged gigabit switches once I (and probably others) pointed out that Buy.com was selling them for $4 cheaper ... heck, $142.99 for an 8-port unmanaged GigE switch? I may click the Buy Now button NOW!
6 minutes to transfer a 4GB CD (after adding overhead) seems just fine to me.
But wouldn't 2 minutes be better?
On a related note, why do 40x CD-burners exist when 12x would be fine?
If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.
Bull. 100Mbit maxes out at about 9MB of data per second at best (and that assumes no extra overhead, like encryption). Even reading from a standard hard drive you can transfer (both read and write) in at least the low 20MBs range over gigabit. That's more than double the speed. And yes, I say this from experience, having set up NFS mounted home directories using both 100Mbit and 1000Mbit networks.
Whether a home user needs that much speed is hard to say, but I for one found gigabit much more pleasant to work with when getting files from remote systems. Hard drives are already the speed bottleneck for most users. If you're going to access hard drives over a network, why slow yourself down even more?
No actually this is pretty much exactly the issue at hand. Honest throughput on good 100Mb NICs is roughly about 10 megs a second, and from my research honest throughput on good GigaNICs is about 100 megs a second (really closer to 94M/s but still...) What this does is move the bottleneck from the network back to the hard drive.
Really doesn't make a difference on files less than 10 megs in size, but when you start moving around the nine 2G files that make up a virtual machine (VMware) so you can burn them to DVD all of a sudden you are looking at a 3x increase in throughput (my drives can read at about 35M/s, can write at about 30M/s so my throughput would be capped at 30M/s) means moving these files in 10 minutes instead of half an hour - lets say I am already looking into GigE for the house.
You are right, hard drives can't move the data fast enough to take advantage of the entire pipe - but since hard drives are 3x faster than 100Mb network hardware (and the new SATA RAID setups (which I don't have (yet)) have been clocked at about 8x faster than 100Mb/s network throughput) you will see a significant increase in things that are network limited.
GigE won't make your network 10x faster in reality, but if you spend a lot of time waiting on network transfers of massive files it will make it 3x (to 8x) faster. It really won't help anything that doesn't already saturate the pipe (ie : VOIP, surfing the net, ping times, latency, network games, streaming DVD quality audio or video.)
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
GboC isn't anywhere near good enough, at least on cat6 cable and 32bit, 33MHz PCI cards, to hit 1000Mbit/sec. It's more like 300 - 350Mbit (technically, I'd be better off doing IP over firewire, in other words).
We're talking about ~40MB/sec in ideal conditions, and that's something most modern ATA drives can tolerate reasonably well. I use Samsung SP1614Ns for most of my storage, which can transfer 33MB/s - 57MB/s (inner/outer zone) and handle 40MB/sec across around 70% of the each disk.
So most of the time, at least in theory, it's not a problem.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I've considered gigabit Ethernet for HD streaming too -- I mostly get smooth playback over my 100Mbps network, but occasionally there's a little glitch when the player app moves to the next file, which doesn't happen when playing from the local disk. Hasn't been important enough to make me shell out the money, though.
Why go to Gigabit? A 100BaseT LAN on a switch can easily handle several video loads. Several of my PCs can pump out 6Mbit/s, (DVD quality). But there is still 94Mbit/s left! Surely you're not going to want to watch 16 videos at once, (100 6 /)?
Also, I don't know of many PCs that will be able to make use of the GigaBit speeds to it's full extent.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34