Gigabit ethernet vs. ?

No, the router should not affect the transfer rates of other devices on your network.

pparks1 said:

Generally speaking, network speeds are rated in megabits per second.

So if we are talking megabits and not megabytes we need to multiply 46,068,430 by 8?

Making 368,547,440 bits per second or 368 megabits per second?

ultraplanet said:

pparks1 said:

Generally speaking, network speeds are rated in megabits per second.

So if we are talking megabits and not megabytes we need to multiply 46,068,430 by 8?

Making 368,547,440 bits per second or 368 megabits per second?

Yes, you certainly can do the math, converting the bytes into bits to get to 368 megabits per second.

For most people these terms just get confusing, because network devices talk in the bits realm, while with hard drives and such people are used to talking in bytes per second.

BeechV35Pilot said:

In other words, if I have this configuration:

Desktop -> Switch -> NAS -> Router to Internet

and all devices are gigabit cabled with Cat5e except for the router (which is 10/100 Mb), would the router outside of my transfer scenario cause the entire network to be slower? I also experience much slower transfer rates than I thought I would see on 10/100/1000 network devices.

This area of computing knowledge has always been one of my weakest.

In this case, your router shoud not impact your speeds of your local network since all of your local network devices are plugged into the switch.

With regards to speed, it's important to make sure that all adapters are configured and getting full speeds and that full duplex is in place. If you have a device that is only negotiating 100 megabit per second speeds, your speed to that device or from it will be negatively impacted.

And as we have said before, you have to take into account the speed of the hard drive in your computer or laptop. Regardless of how fast your network speeds are...if this hard drive cannot move data faster than the network...it will become the bottleneck. Let's say you have a Western Digital 1TB hard drive that has read speeds of 80 megabytes per second. So, if you need to copy from that drive across the network, you won't go any faster than 80 megabytes per second. And you will likely go a bit slower than that...as your OS and such also runs from that drive and this will negatively impact your performance as well. So, let's say you get 75% of your max hard drive speed during the transfer...well that is (80 x .75) = 60 megabytes per second. So, that is really the best that you are going to get and with a little extra overhead on the network and such...you will probably only get 80-85% efficiency...so (60 x .85) = 51 megabytes per second.

You say that you aren't getting the speeds that you thought that you would with your current 10/100/1000 configuration. What types of speeds are you seeing and what did you expect to see?

BeechV35Pilot said:

I am seeing about 13 MB/sec, or about 104Mb/sec. I guess I was expecting more along the lines of 30-40 MB/sec.

What utility do you recommend to test the hard drive's speed?

Yeah, that does seem slow. That's only a slight bit faster than 100 megabits per second.

I usually use HDTune to measure my hard drive speeds.

I usually get about 10.5MB/s at home on my network, which is only 10/100 and my home server only has a 100Mbit/s card....so that is what I would expect.

for you, I would expect at least 30-40MB/s on a gigabit network with Cat5e, all ports at 1000 and full duplex.

What switch are you using?

Might want to take a look at these threads;
Troubleshooting Slow Read/ Transfer Speeds for a Windows Home Server | ServeTheHome.com
Technical Blog for Jim Beveridge: Dell PowerConnect 2708 Performance

This switch really should be providing better performance than what you are seeing?

Interesting thread :)

Factors to consider:

- The choice of network protocol(s) used for testing. For example, FTP is generally much faster than SMB. The former emphasises speed while the latter is "chatty" and rich in the sense used by the UI shell.

- Even if you standardise on a particular protocol for testing purposes, say SMB, the way it's employed is very important. Explorer may sometimes use a different SMB transfer mode to CMD.exe, making the latter faster for simple file transfers.

- Windows-to-Windows, the transfer will negotiate the use of SMB2, at least if both sides are Vista or later Windows variants, and that's much faster than the SMB1 used by XP and most versions of samba, especially over high latency networks. SMB1 has a 64KB limit on the "message" size, which defeats the benefit of window scaling - the sender still has to pause and wait for ACKnowledgement every 64KB. With say 100ms network latency, that produces a theoretical maximum of only 640KB/sec.

- The NIC hardware and NIC driver, assuming the machine is not disk-bound. In other words, for those using enterprise-level disk setups, or something like multiple velociraptors in a RAID 0 stripe, the limiting factor becomes the NIC hardware & driver. Everything else being equal, that $1000 server NIC is going to do a lot better than the $29 Realtek jobbie. In fact, true "gigabit" tends to be attainable only with server-grade NICs.

- The hardware and OS horsepower of the other transfer endpoint. It doesn't matter that you've got a fire-breathing i7 with 47TB of RAM and 16 velociraptors hooked up via pure silver cables if you're copying from a budget NAS whose processor is a 486SX25.

- The type of content being copied. Many small files require far more overhead to manage than a few monstrous ISOs or something similarly large. Hence, effective throughput will frequently be inversely proportional to the average file size.

- Anti-virus filter drivers. If every chunk of the transfer is to be inspected and verified, the overall speed won't be nearly as fast as you'd obtain without AV in the picture. Also, different AV products will use different mechanisms to do their job, leading to different levels of throughput performance.