Help with Achieiving Gigabit Speeds on LAN

[lhsonic]

Here's the deal, I have a laptop and a desktop and my desktop has a few HDDs on it so I do lots of file transfers, obviously, my G router's wireless connection just fails for this kind of task so until I get my problem solved, atm, I'm plugged in to my router and running on the 10/100 transfers offered by my router. Here's the thing though, I have gigabit LAN on both my laptop and the desktop with all the latest drivers but when I plug in my laptop to my desktop directly, I only get speeds that are tad faster than what I get on my 10/100 connection through the router. I'm using a CAT5e cable and task manager reports the connection as being a gigabit connection.

Speeds:
10/100 thru router = ~8MB/s
Direct connection laptop-desktop = ~13-15MB/s

Gigabit lan = theoretically, ~100MB/s ???

Like I understand there are bottlenecks such as the hard drive but... I should still be able to write a lot faster than 13-15MB/s...

What do I do!!??

[Blackjack]

You will need a cross-over cable for this, I believe.

[lhsonic]

You will need a cross-over cable for this, I believe.

Alright, thanks, I did some reading on those.. interesting...

An aunt of mine may have CAT6 cables, I'm going over to get them and see if that works... if not, then I guess I need them dedicated crossover cables...

Hmm... wikipedia says CAT5 can give me 155mbps which is more or less exactly what I'm getting now... so I'm hoping CAT6 will solve it.

[adblink182]

you need cat6 cables, gigbit eithernet cards in both machines and a gigabit router or switch

gigabit lan = 1000mbs/sec

you need a crossover cable to hook 2 computers directly together, however I haven't seen a gigabit crossover cable before

//edit according to this you can use cat5 cables for gigabit

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-behave-on-an-internet-forum

I didn't have time to read the whole thing so i'm not really sure if there is something special you need to do to it or something

[willy]

If they can connect, you don't need a cross-over cable. Also, CAT-5e is supposed to work at Giga-eth speed. One (or both) of your network cards may have the auto-sensing (auto MIDX) capability.

The 'real-life' speed of Giga-eth is ~ 250-350Mbps (~ 30-40MB/s) ...

Just curious ... Do you have Firewire/IEEE 1394 port on both systems ?

[movieman]

Cat-5e should work, and if you didn't have auto-detecting ethernet ports then you shouldn't be able to see the other PC.

Technically, if you're getting 15MB/second, you probably are getting gigabit speeds when you include the transmission overhead... you're just at the low end of the range.

[lhsonic]

Cat-5e should work, and if you didn't have auto-detecting ethernet ports then you shouldn't be able to see the other PC.

Technically, if you're getting 15MB/second, you probably are getting gigabit speeds when you include the transmission overhead... you're just at the low end of the range.


If they can connect, you don't need a cross-over cable. Also, CAT-5e is supposed to work at Giga-eth speed. One (or both) of your network cards may have the auto-sensing (auto MIDX) capability.

The 'real-life' speed of Giga-eth is ~ 250-350Mbps (~ 30-40MB/s) ...

Just curious ... Do you have Firewire/IEEE 1394 port on both systems ?

Oh yeah, no, they both are definitely connected... I coluldn't get my hands on a CAT6 cable.. just another CAT5e, but yeah, I still max out at 14MB/s which task manager reports as being about 20% network utilization... that's a hell of a lot of overhead if I'm really at gigabit speeds.... both computers report a gigabit connection...

Um, so what could be the problem?

Also, I do have firewire, but Windows Vista disabled networking over firewire so that's a no go...

[Bridge]

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10232&cs_id=1023202&p_id=2387&seq=1&format=2


If you can wait for the cable to be shipped....

[Amourek]

It is likely one of your network adapters is responsible for your the poor performance.

I had 3 comps:
#1 E4400 + Gigabyte DS3
#2 P4 2.8C + Asus P4P800
#3 Compaq Evo notebook (P-M 1.4Ghz)

Only the DS3 had an onboard gigabit ethernet adapter that was running off the PCI-E bus. I was getting around 29MB/s between all 3 systems, whether I was using a gigabit switch or a CAT5E crossover cable.

When I upgraded #1 to an E8400 + Gigabyte DS3R, on a lark, I tested the gigabit between the old and new system. Bam! 45MB/s. The drives I used were about 50MB/s when copying to itself.

[cwb27]

Remember...

Do not confuse Bits and Bytes! It's Gigabit, NOT Gigabyte.

Also remember, there are 8 bits in a byte.

[lhsonic]

It is likely one of your network adapters is responsible for your the poor performance.

I had 3 comps:
#1 E4400 + Gigabyte DS3
#2 P4 2.8C + Asus P4P800
#3 Compaq Evo notebook (P-M 1.4Ghz)

Only the DS3 had an onboard gigabit ethernet adapter that was running off the PCI-E bus. I was getting around 29MB/s between all 3 systems, whether I was using a gigabit switch or a CAT5E crossover cable.

When I upgraded #1 to an E8400 + Gigabyte DS3R, on a lark, I tested the gigabit between the old and new system. Bam! 45MB/s. The drives I used were about 50MB/s when copying to itself.

Anyways, your low end speed of 29MB/s still beats out my 14MB/s...

What could be the problem here, my desktop is a 3700+ on a Asus K8V-SE deluxe mobo with Marvell gigabit LAN and my laptop has a T8100 with a Broadcom gigabit ethernet port...


Remember...

Do not confuse Bits and Bytes! It's Gigabit, NOT Gigabyte.

Also remember, there are 8 bits in a byte.

Thanks for that, but everyone that has commented so far seems to know what they're talking about.

[caRpetbomBer]

It might also depend on how fast your hard drive can read and write. My new seagate can spend at 80MB/sec with a cat5 cable. Thats some nice speeds:D

[belowzeros]

yes don't forget to factor your hard drives burst and nominal speed into the equation like a couple people have mentioned.

[cwb27]

Thanks for that, but everyone that has commented so far seems to know what they're talking about.

Feel free to point out where I accuse people of not knowing what they're talking about.

Also, no one really seems to have talked about bits and bytes.

[ichpen]

OK,

Few things to consider...

1. Cat 5 or 5e cable of short length should suffice
2. Cable length is also a consideration so keep it short
3. Networking on Vista is crap and much slower than XP. Recommendation is to switch off the various networking enhancements such as network auto-tuning (google on it) and install SP1.
4. Do not trust the figure Vista shows as the transfer speed. It is 100% of the time incorrect. Instead use a separate app or widget to monitor network speeds.
5. Make sure jumbo frames are set in network properties on both network adapters (it helps). Make sure they're set to the max value which is 9k. This is the size of each packet (read: MTU size)
6. As mentioned, lots of other factors involved here especially HD speed. Your speed will vary (you'll see high burst and much lower sustained speeds). Also things like file fragmentation have a bearing on this.

Hope this helps.

For the record I'm getting between 50 and 75MB/s burst and anywhere between 5MB/s and 35MB/s sustained on Vista 64 to Windows Server 2008 (which is Vista under the hood) going through a GB router.

[lhsonic]

OK,

Few things to consider...

1. Cat 5 or 5e cable of short length should suffice
2. Cable length is also a consideration so keep it short
3. Networking on Vista is crap and much slower than XP. Recommendation is to switch off the various networking enhancements such as network auto-tuning (google on it) and install SP1.
4. Do not trust the figure Vista shows as the transfer speed. It is 100% of the time incorrect. Instead use a separate app or widget to monitor network speeds.
5. Make sure jumbo frames are set in network properties on both network adapters (it helps). Make sure they're set to the max value which is 9k. This is the size of each packet (read: MTU size)
6. As mentioned, lots of other factors involved here especially HD speed. Your speed will vary (you'll see high burst and much lower sustained speeds). Also things like file fragmentation have a bearing on this.

Hope this helps.

For the record I'm getting between 50 and 75MB/s burst and anywhere between 5MB/s and 35MB/s sustained on Vista 64 to Windows Server 2008 (which is Vista under the hood) going through a GB router.

I think this is the help of the day, thanks, i 'll try it out soon!