Gigabit Routers with Wireless abilities

[Albuquerque]

I can only assume you have a very crappy 1000mbit network, Alber... You should get MUCH faster transfer speeds than that! Gigabit ethernet easily transfers 90+ megabytes PER SECOND. That's more than seven times theoretical peak of 100mbit ether.

I don't think that's my issue, as we're all using Cisco Catalyst 4509 cores; these are good devices. I'm more thinking along the lines of the overhead involved in Ghost. You figure that Ghost is still doing some sort of translation between the file coming in and the information going to the disk, so at some point the CPU becomes a bottleneck as well as the "round trip" time from nic to PCI, PCI to CPU, CPU back to PCI, and PCI to disk. I doubt I'm pegging the little WD 80gb 7200rpm drives in the Dells, so I can only assume that Ghost is what's pulling me down.

 

[Frank]

It's like a SAN network when they became popular. A matrix of individual drives, attached to a server by optic fibres. Think about the bandwith throughout all that (including the main switch!), and you realise that the very expensive drives and optic wires have really no impact. And the same goes for the servers: a single 100 Mb card is enough for them to keep the whole network saturated (if you have multiple servers), whatever wiring you use for the clients.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Well the WiFi on the Gigabit router wouldn't be for the speed (I do understand that it would be the regular speed). I just want it so I have the whole thing in one neat package...lol...convenience I guess

As far as throwing down the dough for something I may not utilize...yeah..I think that may be the case here...Here are the things i'm thinking about purchasing just to get two make two computers on a gigabit network....

Switch = $65

PCI Gigabit Card $65

and another PCI Gigabit NIC $40 <- A plain NIC, not like the one with Firewire/USB

I guess with that amount I can get a 939 Socket Motherboard with a cheap CPU (and the board would have PCIe)....but thats my current choice...Upgrade Network or Upgrade Motherboard/CPU...

 

[Albuquerque]

Well, it's time for ROI (return on investment)! Which scenario gives you overall more ability to do work:

1. A gigabit network on existing equipment.

2. A 100mbit network on upgraded equipment.

I have a preference for the latter, but my computing tasks do not need a high speed wired network. Most of my network traffic is Telnet, SSH, MS Terminal Services, FTP, and web port-80 stuff. I do a bit of filesharing to pipe music into my "main" PC in the living room, but a 192kbps MP3 could be streamed across a 4mbit Token Ring card without ever once having a problem

 

[BlueTsunami]

Well, it's time for ROI (return on investment)! Which scenario gives you overall more ability to do work:

1. A gigabit network on existing equipment.

2. A 100mbit network on upgraded equipment.

I have a preference for the latter, but my computing tasks do not need a high speed wired network. Most of my network traffic is Telnet, SSH, MS Terminal Services, FTP, and web port-80 stuff. I do a bit of filesharing to pipe music into my "main" PC in the living room, but a 192kbps MP3 could be streamed across a 4mbit Token Ring card without ever once having a problem

LOL....yeah...I have more enjoyment working with Networking I guess...so when I see that i'm able to upgrade to a gigbabit infrastructure in my home..my mouth waters .

BUT..I have been meaning to get a meaningful upgrade (I have a Socket A...err..I forget the CPU type, got it off EBay..but its a AMD 1.8GHz/200FSB ...lol...I should really upgrade and give the old parts to my server....

 

[BlueTsunami]

Wow...check this "Product Overview" that I found for a PCIe Gigabit NIC

D-Link DGE-560T PCI Express Gigabit Network Adapter
The DGE-560T PCI Express Gigabit Network Adapter from D-Link is a high performance adapter designed for the high-speed PCI Express Bus Architecture. The PCI Express Network Adapter from D-Link offers increased bandwidth, reliability, and more functionality than standard PCI network cards. It is specifically designed to allow throughput at rates up to 2Gbps, thus eliminating the bottleneck that exists with current 32 and 64 bit PCI bus architectures. With support for advanced features such as: 802.3x flow control, SNMP for network monitoring and management, and Jumbo Frames, interoperability with your current networking equipment, and network feature sets will not be an issue.

Source:

D-Link - DGE-560T - 10/100/1000 PCI Express Gigabit Network Adapter

I don't know if there just building up the product to something more than it is...but if thats true..then yeah...a Gigabit PCIe sounds more interesting than a PCI version of the card. They also make it out to sound as the PCI slots as a limiting factor for the MAX speed of the NIC itself (As was stated in previous posts on this thread).

Hmmmm....a new Motherboard with PCIe sounds like the way to go (one with a Gigabit connector onboard..then get a Gigabit PCIe NIC...lol).

 

[Guden Oden]

PCIe is 250MB (theoretical; as it's serial packet-based, real performance will be less) in EACH direction. Not only is it quite close to double theoretical performance of PCI in of itself, it doubles up on that by being able to send and receive at the same time too. This is very suited for full-duplex network cards, as PCI bus turnaround (switching from send to receive or other way around) steals performance.

DLink makes rather nice equipments with good price/performance ratio. I dunno tho how much hardware acceleration this card features, but you should realize that it will be a major drain on free CPU if it has to do all the packet creation and CRC calculation stuff at the speed gigabit ethernet runs at. You can get away with little to no acceleration on 100mbit, because it's a relatively slow network. 1000mbit tho is a different beastie entirely.

Maybe read a review or two first before you buy?

Oh, and do note that cat5 network cable works with gigabit...sort of. Or so I hear anyway. From what I read, people recommend cat6 cabling to reduce the risk of transmission errors.

 

[BlueTsunami]

PCIe is 250MB (theoretical; as it's serial packet-based, real performance will be less) in EACH direction. Not only is it quite close to double theoretical performance of PCI in of itself, it doubles up on that by being able to send and receive at the same time too. This is very suited for full-duplex network cards, as PCI bus turnaround (switching from send to receive or other way around) steals performance.

DLink makes rather nice equipments with good price/performance ratio. I dunno tho how much hardware acceleration this card features, but you should realize that it will be a major drain on free CPU if it has to do all the packet creation and CRC calculation stuff at the speed gigabit ethernet runs at. You can get away with little to no acceleration on 100mbit, because it's a relatively slow network. 1000mbit tho is a different beastie entirely.

Maybe read a review or two first before you buy?

Oh, and do note that cat5 network cable works with gigabit...sort of. Or so I hear anyway. From what I read, people recommend cat6 cabling to reduce the risk of transmission errors.

Wow...I didn't know it could send and recieve at the same time like that. PCIe Gigabit NIC kinda sounds exotic (in that it does alot of things that are uniqe to PCIe). As far as the draining from the CPU, that could be an issue with mine (Vanilla CPU with an extremley low fsb). BUT to get PCIe i'll have to upgrade my equipment and if I do that, i'll surely get a better CPU to accomadate the wonderful PCIe slots

About the Cat5 vs Cat6....I've heard that Cat5 works well but your are correct about the transmission losses. I believe that with Gigabit connection your using more of the wire than 100mbit (obviously) so if the wire isn't up to snuff...you get problems. I've heard that you don't need to go straight up with the more expensive Cat6 but you can use Cat5e as an alternative (I believe its called Cat5e...some type of enhance cabling)

 

[Guden Oden]

100mbit ethernet uses just one pair in each direction of the ethernet cable, or 4 cables out of the full 8. Some el cheapo cables don't even have more than 4 conductors in 'em...

1000mbit uses all four pairs in either direction, and they need to be properly twisted too or else lots of problems may ensue. Cat5e is tighter twisting compared to standard 5 I believe, but it's sort of a half-measure really. Cat6 is directly designed for 1000mbit use, though more expensive, sure. Still, it may well be money well spent if you're serious about gigabit networking.