NetGear GS108

[Low_Level_Owl]

So I decided to upgrade my existing 4 10/100 port switch with this 8 10/100/1000 port switch because all my computers have onboard Gigabit adapters.

I picked up some Cat5e cable just in case and I made my way home. I plugged everything up and ran a few tests.

I must say I'm a bit disappointed. My average thorougput was 30%. That's about 300Mbps. I know that it's better than what I used to have but I was hoping for at least 60%. All the NIC settings are set to Auto.

Anyone have any ideas? All the cards are being seen a 1Gbps cards. And I also updated all the drivers to the latest and greatest.

[Platypus]

picked up some Cat5e cable just in case

So the network is run with 5e?

[Ferrit]

Gigabit requires Cat 6 I believe

[Platypus]

Cat5 is 100Mbit, 5e is specified for gigabit, Cat6 is less susceptible to interference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/467066.html

[Low_Level_Owl]

My network is Cat5e. It's the cable we use at work on our Gigabit network and it's not much of a problem there. Think I would see some sort of change with Cat6?

[Platypus]

Think I would see some sort of change with Cat6?

Hard to say. Is cable run in electrically difficult places (near electrical cables, fluorescent lights etc)? Then maybe so.

[Low_Level_Owl]

It's run near a UPS, two surge protectors and two electrical outlets.

[PBase001]

Read through this article.

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/webmaster/article.php/3511816

Seems most likely it's the PC or NIC card that is holding you back from full usage of your Gigabit network.

In fact, if you ever read the NIC card reviews by...

http://www.digit-life.com/

You'll see that PCI is an ill suited slot to provide full gigabit access. This of course depends on if you're using any PCI gigabit NIC's.

Test again using onboard motherboard gigibit NIC's if you have them and hopefully you'll get far better results.

[Low_Level_Owl]

All but one Gigabit NIC are onboard. I've tested 4 machines (including the PCI NIC) and it sticks around 30% no matter what two machines I use to transfer data to and from.

[PBase001]

Just making guesses, don't know the actual reason for sure until you run through some more troubleshooting to pin down the problem.

On board NIC's tend to be untethered by the restraints of the PCI shared bandwidth limitations. If 200Mb/s is reasonable on your previous 100Mb network, than 300 would be about 33% increase in speed if you were getting pure 200Mb/s bandwidth from your old network to begin with. :)

Until you could test another Gb onboard NIC to your current PC with onboard Gb NIC, there is no way to be sure what could be your bottleneck at this point.

But my best guess is that the PCI NIC's is the bottleneck.

But if someone else have a better theory, I'm willing to learn. ;)

[PBase001]

Like I posted, digit-life does some great network card reviews and here is one of them...

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/gigeth32bit/gig-eth-32bit-2.html

This is their conclusion...

Conclusion

Jumbo Frames are certainly a useful thing. But the speed is still too dependent on the driver, just look at the Intel PRO 1000/MT. It performs better compared to the previous tests. But still, the maximum (1 Gbit) can't be reached because of the 32-bit PCI bus. Nevertheless, the server (64-bit) adapters were tested on the 32-bit PCI bus for comparison of both versions of the cards. As you can see from the diagrams, there are almost no differences in case of the 32-bit bus.