DescentBB

Hi everyone

I just realized that somewhere something on my home network isn't preforming at it's peak. Firstly I've never noticed it until recently when the file sized I tend to transfer over the LAN increased to Gigabyte file. The setup is as follows:

I've got a Billion Router with 4x 10/100 LAN ports and another switch (Cheap Cnet 8x 10/100) in the house linking the farthest pc mid way and obviously the Router and Switch is bridged.

In essence
Router: 3 ports = 3 PC & 1 port = Cnet Switch
Cnet Switc: 1 port = Router & 1 port = PC & 1 port = another point I sometimes use in my bedroom

This setup served me well up until now but I have some issues and this is why I was looking at upgrading but then realized the second issue.

Issue one is that I'm in need of at least one more LAN port in my PC room, but more can't hurt either. So the idea was to get a new switch to bridge the router on as well. But then I started digging into the transfer rate I get over my LAN. The max it peaked at that I've seen so far is just 7Mb/s. But mostly it will average 5Mb/s or as low as 3Mb/s. Now a 10/100 LAN should be able to deliver a peak of 12.5Mb/s right but I'm not getting close to that. Now the next question you will want to ask is what HDD do I have and the PC's I mostly transfer files between both have SATAII HDD @ 7200RPM and I've tested both and they peak at 77Mb/s on a 1.5Gb file HDD to HDD. But then if I initiate the copy between the two HDD's on the one pc over the LAN it only gets 3Mb/s?

The one other PC still have IDE133 HDD @ 7200 but I rarely need to transfer big file from this PC and know that the transfer rate of that pc over the LAN will be considerably less than what the SATAII drives will be able to deliver.

Given the transfer rate of the SATAII drives I was leaning toward upgrading to a proper 10/100/1000 switch as the two main pc's I tend to transfer files between both have Gigabit Ethernet on-board.

But will this solve the transfer issue I'm seeing or is there something I'm overlooking? Obviously if I was going to get the 10/100/1000 switch I would have only bridged the router to one port to enable the internet over the network and linked the rest of the pc's, farthest included directly to the new 10/100/1000 switch. In short I'd also just want to confirm that setting it up like this I'd have a Gibabit enabled LAN then and it won't be down-scaled to a slower speed for some reason. My networking knowledge isn't that great.

As far as I remember all the LAN cables I have is Cat5 which should work on a Gigabit Ethernet?

So any ideas or suggestions before I might just end up wasting money on a new switch that will leave me with the same transfer rate issue?

I got a similar setup to what you are looking at -- modem/router/ap connected to a 10/100/1000 switch where all wired PCs (w/ GB NICs) connect to. Traffic betw. wired PCs is FAST, betw. wired & wireless slower (throttled to < 54Mb/s) , and betw. wired & internet slooow (1.5Mb/s.) Works as expected.

CAT5 should work for 1000BASE-T (IEEE 802.3ab)

I know at one time vista had a problem with a large file transfer across a network but since you didn't mention an OS. Some Cat 5 cables do not support gigabyte lan I think that was before 1991 though. Cat 5e does as well as Cat 6. Because of the high speeds everything about a Gigabit lan, cables must be correct.

More info http://www.zytrax.com/tech/layer_1/cabl ... n.htm#1000

Grendel wrote:I got a similar setup to what you are looking at -- modem/router/ap connected to a 10/100/1000 switch where all wired PCs (w/ GB NICs) connect to. Traffic betw. wired PCs is FAST, betw. wired & wireless slower (throttled to < 54Mb/s) , and betw. wired & internet slooow (1.5Mb/s.) Works as expected.

CAT5 should work for 1000BASE-T (IEEE 802.3ab)

Internet slow (1.5Mb/s) try a 384kps ADSL line (38Kb/s) Internet traffic and service in this country is decades behind and just to clarify the traffic I'm referring to is wired and not over the wireless, although my wireless is enabled for the laptop that travels through the house. My OS's is Win 7 (x64) and XP Pro (x32).

If you are comfortable working a command line interface, here is a handy little utility for testing your raw network speed: http://www.pcausa.com/Utilities/pcattcp.htm
Most of the network speed testers out there use a network shared folder to test the speed, but that frequently ends up being limited by the speed of the disk the share is on instead of the speed of the network which is why this one is worth figuring out because it eliminates the underlying hard drives from the test.

Note that for faster networks it is worthwhile to increase the amount of data sent to get an accurate reading (use the -l switch on the sending client). For instance I get ~250 mbits on my gigabit network when I use the default 16 MB test size, but if I bump the sending client up to say 100000 or longer buffer lengths (~200 MB) I get ~800-850 mbits.