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

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?

[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?

[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.

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?