Help speed-up my gigabit ethernet

[gusmahler]

Just got a new laptop that has a gigabit ethernet port. Since my desktop has a gigabit ethernet port also, I got a gigabit switch. I connected both computers to the switch via CAT 6 cables. The Control panel of both computers show that the speed of the port is 1000 Mb/sec.

Setting up file transfers between the laptop and the desktop, I'm only getting transfer speeds of about 7 MB/sec. That seems pretty slow to me.

The computers are just setup using the standard Windows settings (setting up the desktop's music folder as a shared folder and just dragging the files to the laptop). What settings should I be using to take full advantage of the gigabit connection?

[Josem]

I don't know the substantial answer to your question, however, I think you're getting MegaBITS and MegaBYTES confused. Obviously, a megabyte is larger than a megabit.

[kerowo]

Google MTU numbers, that may help things, something to do with the size of the packets I think.

[nuclear500]

heh

7MB/s is fine. Unless you have some nice high speed hard disks on BOTH computers, you won't be seeing much more then this.

People seem to think that just because the network says it can do 1Gb/s they think they should see that - well thats just never gonna happen. The fastest consumer hard drives around are only going to get you tops of around 15MB/s (just over 100Mb) sustained. The 7MB/s you are seeing is acceptable.

You may try defragging the sending computer, if the file is heavily fragmented on the other computer additional time is needed to seek the file fragments, etc.

[gusmahler]

[ QUOTE ]
heh

7MB/s is fine. Unless you have some nice high speed hard disks on BOTH computers, you won't be seeing much more then this.

People seem to think that just because the network says it can do 1Gb/s they think they should see that - well thats just never gonna happen. The fastest consumer hard drives around are only going to get you tops of around 15MB/s (just over 100Mb) sustained. The 7MB/s you are seeing is acceptable.

[/ QUOTE ]

I just transfered a 1.39 GB folder from one hard drive to another on the desktop. Since they're both hooked up directly to a SATA port, that should be the theoretical fastest it can transfer. It took 53 seconds, or about 26 MB/sec. I was only getting 7 MB/sec transfer speeds when I tranferred the file to the laptop.

The laptop hard drive is probably much slower than the desktop hard drive, so that may be the cause.

So is gigabit ethernet basically worthless for consumers?

[nuclear500]

Oh, and the fact you say its a laptop gives even more credence to the 7MB/s being acceptable. Laptop drives, unless specified differenlty, are almost universally 5400 RPM IDE drives. Not the speediest things in the world.

[nuclear500]

Disk to disk across the same bus is always going to be faster then disk to south bridge through the PCI bus and out to a network layer which adds overhead.

Is it worthless? Like poker, it depends, but it depends not only on the time requirements, but the hardware that is capable of performing fast enough for it to show its worthyness [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I would say that for the most part, yes, it is "worthless" but seeing as how pretty much everything is classified as 10/100/1000 these days, purposely avoiding it to save $25 is whats worthless IMO.

[nuclear500]

The Max Transmission Unit setting could be changed, but the limit set on Ethernet is 1500 bytes / packet - so increasing it would actually decrease performance as more overhead is required to break up the 1500+ packet size and then recombine.

Decreasing, to a point, might improve performance, but it depends on the size of the file(s) Very small files it might improve, but for large files it would sink some.

[PLOlover]

if u got a lot of ram, make a ramdisk of 1gig on each computer and then copy a big file to ramdisk and then transfer and see how much it speeds up.