Thoughts about a Gigabit ethernet switch

[John Gray]

Suppose I have a small gigabit ethernet switch (also support 100 Mbps, of course) with the following port allocations

Port 1 - PC with gigabit NIC
Port 2 - PC with gigabit NIC
Port 3 - onward link to large 100 Mbps switch, and the rest of the LAN

Would you expect copying of data between those two PCs to be at gigabit data rates (hard disk transfer rates permitting)?

[HansV]

Yes, I would think so, but I'm not an expert in this.

[StuartR]

Yes, in principle, depending on how much processing of the data is needed at each end. Even with a very powerful CPU and plenty of memory, there are few applications that are capable of moving data at Gigabit speeds.

[John Gray]

On the basis of the above information (and no other!) I spent £lots on a Gigabit ethernet switch, and tested a file copy of a 22 GB system image backup of one of our PCs to a NAS box, and found

1) the file copy would saturate the normal 100 Mbps connection, running it at about 99+%, around 12.4 MB/s

2) with the Gigabit switch inserted, the file copy runs about 8 x faster, just less than 100 MB/s, presumably at peak disk speed(s)
Here is a graph of it running (the Bytes Sent/Received are per second)...

GigabitTransfer.png

[dasadler]

I am not a real tech N/W guy but after buying a new house, I put a gigbit switch in my N/W and I also used only Cat 6 Ethernet during the wiring phase. I have no empirical data to support my claim but data transfers between PCs is the fastest I ever had anywhere - my old house did not have gigabit capacity. I think the type cabling makes a difference as the entire data chain is no faster than the weakest link (or slowest component).

My next challenge is to find a decent (and affordable) NAS.