Do you use fast or gigabit ethernet on your home/biz network?

[rowan]

I've upgraded to fastethernet (100Mbit/sec) and installed Samba so that I can back up directly from my XP box to my server, but it's pretty slow! The maximum speed is about 6Mbytes/sec, and it slows down other network activity from the comp like web browsing... I guess it's near completely saturated.

Anyone here use gigabit ether? (1000Mbit/sec). I'm pretty sure my server and drive are not the bottleneck in this case... perhaps a couple of gigabit cards and a crossover cable would do the trick.

[AgentCash]

I use it and it's much better than 100 Mb, but the harddrive is the major bottleneck at this point.

[Robx]

Or an external firewire drive.

[rowan]

Yeah, I'm not expecting to leap up to 60Mbytes/sec by moving to gigabit... but 15-20Mbytes/sec or higher would be good. gigabit also leaves plenty of headroom for other packets to squeeze through the network when I'm running a full backup session. Hmm, speaking of full backups, I have 200Gb+ on this workstation. I'm not sure whether I should even bother trying with only 100Mbit ether.

[SinisterStudios]

I've upgraded to fastethernet (100Mbit/sec) and installed Samba so that I can back up directly from my XP box to my server, but it's pretty slow! The maximum speed is about 6Mbytes/sec, and it slows down other network activity from the comp like web browsing... I guess it's near completely saturated.

Anyone here use gigabit ether? (1000Mbit/sec). I'm pretty sure my server and drive are not the bottleneck in this case... perhaps a couple of gigabit cards and a crossover cable would do the trick.

Sounds like you have a sped/duplex issue, check your nic settings and if they are not 100/FD there is your issue

[whyaskwhy]

If you are using a hub and not a switch then you will have that problem. You are utilizing about 48mbps on your connection device between computers. That should not effect a 3 mbps cable connection. You also may be killing your work stations i/o performance (hard drive). What type of cpu and what hard drive specs are in your computer.

[whyaskwhy]

Upgrading to gigabit copper will not help you at this point since you are not even utilizing a fast ethernet adapter. 6M Bytes * 8 = 48 Mbits per second. Your nic card is capable of about 12.5 MegaBytes per second of data transfer.