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?"

Comments

Re:Shouldn't it be 1024?

[Patik]

That's gigabyte. Bit prefixes go by 1000 (10^2), byte prefixes go by 2^10.

What kind of distribution?

[cjpez]

What sort of distribution are you talking about here, anyway? I've got a little LAN hooked up with a simple little 100Mbit Netgear switch, and I NFS-mount my audio and video partitions over to the computer downstairs hooked into the TV (running Freevo at the moment). The 100Mbit switch is perfectly fast enough to stream even DVDs mounted in the computer upstairs, to say nothing of the smaller compressed DivX (or whatever) stuff. If you're just talking about some home theatre kind of movie sharing, there really wouldn't be a need for it.

Of course, if your needs are more extensive you may need something more...

Re:What kind of distribution?

[cjpez]

I don't think you'd need anything more than 100Mbit for that. I don't have any experience with VOIP, but I can't imagine it sucks up bandwidth any worse than DVD-quality video, and I imagine that the security camera stuff isn't going to suck up anything major either.

Anyway, 100Mbit is cheap enough that you could always just install that first and then expand if you need more. If you just make sure that the cable you're running can handle gigabit, you can always plunk down more money later for a gigabit switch and NICs, to replace the $15 NICs and $50 switch you put in originally for 100.

Re:What kind of distribution?

[Total_Wimp]

But what if you actually want to copy that video? How long do you wait while hundreds of megs or gigs of data transfer? Do you want to wait less time? Gigabit is great and you'll waist _a lot_ less time waiting for your file transfers.

Lets face it, faster is better. If I could copy a whole DVD in a minute, I'd still prefer the solution the let me copy it in a second.

TW

Re:What kind of distribution?

[cybermace5]

Yeah, but consider multiple terminals around the house, all pulling down different full-resolution DVD video streams. I could see the bandwidth piling up. Plus, who knows what network-intensive applications we'll be using a few years down the road.

Plus, what if he wants to have a fast backup solution? With the sizes of hard drives these days, you can use all the transfer speed you can get. Let's say he has a server with enough space to maintain a full backup of his 120 Gig drive on his workstation. Using gigabit ethernet, it will take a theoretical minimum of 17 minutes to transfer all of the data. With 100mb ethernet, it'll take a minimum of 2 hours and 50 minutes. That's an extreme example, but you know, it'll shave off a few seconds here and there during normal use. It all adds up at the end of the day.

Re:What kind of distribution?

[doormat]

Three words...

Multiple HD Streams

An broadcast quality 1080i stream is 19.8Mbit/s. If you figure the max you can get out of 100Mbit/s ethernet is 85%-90% , and you want more than 4 streams (yea, sounds outlandish now, but in 5 years it might not seem so weird). Plus standard network traffic (if you dont make seperate networks) and you're looking at gigabit ethernet.

Re:What kind of distribution?

[Shanep]

If you're just talking about some home theatre kind of movie sharing, there really wouldn't be a need for it.

Yes, 100Mbit should be plenty for that.

Watching a raw DVD file served from my OpenBSD Samba server, uses about 7Mbit. That's not to say that other DVD's won't require more though, but certainly not 100Mbit, let alone 1Gbit.

Re:What kind of distribution?

[darkonc]

But what if you actually want to copy that video? How long do you wait while hundreds of megs or gigs of data transfer?

$ units 1second/100megabit minutes/4gigabyte<br>
* 5.3333333

6 minutes to transfer a 4GB CD (after adding overhead) seems just fine to me. If you're really expecting to get better than that, you'll need RAID on both ends of the pipe.

About the only reason I can see for wanting to go gigabit in a house is if your whole family is doing remote video editing, and you've got a nice, 10-spindle RAID box to do the file serving.

Before everyone knocks the poster

[dj245]

Now I know this is /. but before everyone says "you don't need gigabit!" and "bah, who needs that kind of speed" gigabit ethernet is genuinely useful. Even copying 500mb files can take intolerably long when you want it done 4 minutes ago. If the poster wanted a bunch of nonsense about why he shouldn't do it and why its a dumb idea, he could have gone to Circuit city (they don't sell gigabit so they would try to sell him 10/100). Instead he asked us for an informed option and information on the matter.

Anything 100Mbps ...

[Chris Tyler]

But you don't have to be able to pump the full 1000 Mbps to take advantage of gigabit ethernet. As long as you can pump more than 100 Mbps, then gigabit will give you a speed improvement over 100 Mbps ethernet.

(Or, a good location for the ceiling is "anywhere above your head").

Re:You don't need gigabit

[bogie]

"The same goes for switches. You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch."

40MB is a hell of a lot better than 10MB. I don't know why everyone keeps saying he won't be able to saturate the line. He doesn't need to max it out in order to enjoy the benefits over 100Mb ethernet. Who knows what kind data we will be dealing with in 5 years? Seems like going 1000 is a smart investment.

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. Considering the cost is so cheap why even bother with 100MB if you think you'll be using bandwidth hungry apps?

Re:You don't need gigabit

[Admiral Burrito]

Unless you get a very hot, brand new PC with motherboard integrated gigE, your PCI bus can't push the bandwidth.

Being integrated with the motherboard doesn't make a performance difference on any board I've ever seen. It still goes over the PCI bus, it's just not using a slot. Creating a separate bus just for the ethernet port would be too expensive.

You'll be doing good to get 400 mbps out of a cheap gig switch.

I'd be interested to know where you came up with that. Some switches may have an underpowered backplane that limits your aggregate bandwidth (such that you can't pump a full 1Gbps on all ports simultaneously) but it shouldn't prevent you pushing 1Gbps between two ports when all else is idle. If it's advertised as a gigabit switch but is only capable of 400 Mbps, wouldn't the manufacturer be open to claims of false advertising?

Re:Which is why Gigabit doesn't fit the home

[Quikah]

Uh, have you ever tried copying 3 hours worth of HD video from your capture system to your main workstation over 100 Mb. After 15 minutes you will be begging for Gb.

Even though I would probably only get double the speed (disk bottlenecks, one is a slow system) I still am thinking it might be worth it.

Bah

[Aoverify]

I dont get it. People here are bitching that the best throughput they see on gigabit ethernet is 400Mbps. Thats 4x the speed of regular 100Mbps ethernet. 4x still seems like a hell of an improvement, especially when you consider gigabit switches can be had for $100-150. I'd take a 4x faster HDD, processor, memory, etc anyday! Why snub your noses at at 4x network speed increase?

How fast are your disks?

[Moderation abuser]

Because you'll find that you can't write to a filesystem on a single disk much faster than 100mbit anyway. Gigabit is significantly faster than the I/O that a single drive can provide.