100 meg connection only transferring at about 60meg?

vibe666

i have a crossover cable connecting two PC's and both NIC's are set to 100full, but according to DU Meter, the average transfer speed is about 50-60mbit.

is this because it's a crossover cable and not a hub/switch/router? does this setup cause speed problems?

one of the NIC's supports gigabit lan, so I was thinking of gettign another card for the other one and setting them both to 1gbit.

just needed the extra speed for video encoding accross the network (one PC as a file server/video encoder and the other as a plain encoder dragging the files over as it does the encoding, as it doesn't have the HD space to do too many jobs at once. (DVD to DivX btw, and only one machine has a DVD drive).

thnx.

Sleipnir

ah you'll never get the true 100mb. Like you'll never get a true 56kb dialup connection.

obviously you know that the 100mb card is the bottleneck here so changing it for a GBLAN card would increase the speed.

Sleipnir

oh, make sure you get a gigabit cat5 cable too.

jayok

Point of note, out of Gb ethernet, expect to get about 400mb/s! :rolleyes:

Capt'n Midnight

The 100Mb is the maximum possible number of bits.
every piece of data is wrapped in a packet with TCIP/IP and/or MAC addresses, there are other overheads for ACK and CRC's for handshaking and retries. Duplesx / Store and forward means you don't have to wait for the other end to become silent before you transimit but it means a slicht delay - crossover cable should not have this.

You also depend on the CARD drivers and the processing power on the card - you pay more for server cards for this reason - the data on the wire is fluctuating voltages that have to be modulated/demodulated back into bits. you can also get noise on the line and echos - but that's a different story and if the cards at both ends of the link are the same brand you can use a diag utility to ID this.

And then there is the OS. Older versions of windows on slow PC's never seemed to get more than 300MBs (Byte) on a 10Mbs line.

Gigabit Cat - it is supposed to run on Cat5 - but there is Cat5 and Cat5
so if you get Cat 5e then you can be sure. Also you should make sure that there is no more than 1/2" of untwisted cable at each end of the plug. (I take the cable is more than 18" long)

Think of the 100Mb as your gross pay before PAYE / PRSI / Youth employment Levy etc. etc. . And of course you can't spend all the money that goes into your bank account 'cos the standing orders will take thier toll too.

vibe666

good stuff, that cleared up loads for me. you know it was just one of those things that puzzled me (one of many).

i just got a new mobo that has onboard gb ethernet, so i'm sorted for that now.

now my problem is that i want to be able to expand my network without losing the gigbit speeds where i have them at the moment, and i'm having trouble finding a hub/switch/router (anyone know what the difference is with them? i never knew that either) that will support my gigabit cards at full speed AND have a wifi AP built in (don't want much do I! ).

can I do this in one device, or do I just need to get a 4 port hub/switch/router (what's the difference and which is better for my needs?) and use my existing vanilla 802.11b AP (Airway Transport) plugged into that?

thnx.

edit: damn, i just read through this post and it's a mess. can everyone understand what i'm after, or do i need to clean it up a bit for readability?

Capt'n Midnight

Don't forget that XP reserves 20% of bandwidth for QoS packets
You can untick the QoS Packet Scheduler to see it that helps

vibe666

yeah, already did that. had heard about it before. good tip for others to remember though.

aren't QoS packets something supposed to make (big) LAN's more efficient or something? (me guessing again).