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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
I just bought two NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI adapters and a NetGear
GS605 GigaBit Ethernet Switch. I have two computers with the PCI cards in them connected through my home network into the GS605. Much of my network is wired into the walls. I'm pretty sure I am not getting gigabit transfer speeds, and the NetGear utility is reporting the speed as 100M/Full. The 1000 light is not lit up on the back of the card. Is it possible for the cards to detect lower quality cables, and downshift to 100M speeds? |
#2
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
EdwardATeller wrote:
I just bought two NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI adapters and a NetGear GS605 GigaBit Ethernet Switch. I have two computers with the PCI cards in them connected through my home network into the GS605. Much of my network is wired into the walls. I'm pretty sure I am not getting gigabit transfer speeds, and the NetGear utility is reporting the speed as 100M/Full. The 1000 light is not lit up on the back of the card. Is it possible for the cards to detect lower quality cables, and downshift to 100M speeds? A possible reason, is the number of wires in the cable. Or a bad connection at the connector itself. 10/100BT uses four wires of the eight in the cable. 1000BT (Gigabit) uses eight wires. If your cable only happens to have four wires in it, then "no Gigabit for you" :-) When I first got my current motherboard, the RJ-45 connector was dirty. Fortunately for me, a second computer had the Marvell VCT cable tester inside its Ethernet chip, and the cable tester told me a pin wasn't connected (when I connected the computers together). I inserted and removed the connector, until VCT said it was making connections, and then I got Gigabit operation. In terms of the frequencies involved, the designers of the gigabit standard, wanted to stay within the same range of frequencies. They use multilevel signalling, called PAM-5. More details can be seen in the "1000BASE-T details" section here, as to how that is possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_Ethernet Paul |
#4
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
On Feb 25, 4:47 pm, pcbldrNinetyEight pcbldrninetyeight.com wrote:
EdwardATeller wrote in news:1c2b06f7-e563-499f- : I just bought two NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI adapters and a NetGear GS605 GigaBit Ethernet Switch. I have two computers with the PCI cards in them connected through my home network into the GS605. Much of my network is wired into the walls. I'm pretty sure I am not getting gigabit transfer speeds, and the NetGear utility is reporting the speed as 100M/Full. The 1000 light is not lit up on the back of the card. Is it possible for the cards to detect lower quality cables, and downshift to 100M speeds? Test your equipment by connecting it together directly with cat5e patch cables capable of Gigabit speeds. Available hehttp://www.cyberguys.com/templates/S...categoryID=132 -- pcbldrNinetyEight Thanks for the quick replies. I did have a bad cable, which I replaced, and now I am running at full speed. One thing I learned is that sometimes I had to power cycle the switch for it to recognize a better cable. It isn't as fast as I thought it would be. I have my old router plugged into the gigabit switch for internet access, and that connection lights up as 100. Maybe that slows the whole switch down. I'll do some testing when I have more time. Bottom line, make sure you have good cables. Also, don't have your switch in the basement and computers on the 2nd floor unless you want some serious exercise. |
#5
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
EdwardATeller wrote:
On Feb 25, 4:47 pm, pcbldrNinetyEight pcbldrninetyeight.com wrote: EdwardATeller wrote in news:1c2b06f7-e563-499f- : I just bought two NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI adapters and a NetGear GS605 GigaBit Ethernet Switch. I have two computers with the PCI cards in them connected through my home network into the GS605. Much of my network is wired into the walls. I'm pretty sure I am not getting gigabit transfer speeds, and the NetGear utility is reporting the speed as 100M/Full. The 1000 light is not lit up on the back of the card. Is it possible for the cards to detect lower quality cables, and downshift to 100M speeds? Test your equipment by connecting it together directly with cat5e patch cables capable of Gigabit speeds. Available hehttp://www.cyberguys.com/templates/S...categoryID=132 -- pcbldrNinetyEight Thanks for the quick replies. I did have a bad cable, which I replaced, and now I am running at full speed. One thing I learned is that sometimes I had to power cycle the switch for it to recognize a better cable. It isn't as fast as I thought it would be. I have my old router plugged into the gigabit switch for internet access, and that connection lights up as 100. Maybe that slows the whole switch down. I'll do some testing when I have more time. Bottom line, make sure you have good cables. Also, don't have your switch in the basement and computers on the 2nd floor unless you want some serious exercise. No, the router won't affect the overall speed of the network -- that is one of the advantages of a switch. Computers capable of gigabit speed will communicate at some mutually-agreed speed up to the limit among themselves while the internet connection will happen at either 10 or 100 depending on the setup. But since the internet connection will never be very fast (relatively speaking) this is of no matter. You can verify for yourself that the router doesn't affect speeds between computers by testing speed with it connected to the switch and without it. Oh, btw, you will probably never seen anything like true gigabit transfers despite the name unless your network has proper CAT-6 wiring done perfectly. And probably not even then. I consider myself lucky when I manage 50mB/s (500mb/s, or half-gigabit) transfers over my CAT-5e wiring. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA] http://johnmcgaw.com |
#6
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
On Feb 26, 12:27 pm, John McGaw wrote:
EdwardATeller wrote: On Feb 25, 4:47 pm, pcbldrNinetyEight pcbldrninetyeight.com wrote: EdwardATeller wrote in news:1c2b06f7-e563-499f- : I just bought two NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI adapters and a NetGear GS605 GigaBit Ethernet Switch. I have two computers with the PCI cards in them connected through my home network into the GS605. Much of my network is wired into the walls. I'm pretty sure I am not getting gigabit transfer speeds, and the NetGear utility is reporting the speed as 100M/Full. The 1000 light is not lit up on the back of the card. Is it possible for the cards to detect lower quality cables, and downshift to 100M speeds? Test your equipment by connecting it together directly with cat5e patch cables capable of Gigabit speeds. Available hehttp://www.cyberguys.com/templates/S...categoryID=132 -- pcbldrNinetyEight Thanks for the quick replies. I did have a bad cable, which I replaced, and now I am running at full speed. One thing I learned is that sometimes I had to power cycle the switch for it to recognize a better cable. It isn't as fast as I thought it would be. I have my old router plugged into the gigabit switch for internet access, and that connection lights up as 100. Maybe that slows the whole switch down. I'll do some testing when I have more time. Bottom line, make sure you have good cables. Also, don't have your switch in the basement and computers on the 2nd floor unless you want some serious exercise. No, the router won't affect the overall speed of the network -- that is one of the advantages of a switch. Computers capable of gigabit speed will communicate at some mutually-agreed speed up to the limit among themselves while the internet connection will happen at either 10 or 100 depending on the setup. But since the internet connection will never be very fast (relatively speaking) this is of no matter. You can verify for yourself that the router doesn't affect speeds between computers by testing speed with it connected to the switch and without it. Oh, btw, you will probably never seen anything like true gigabit transfers despite the name unless your network has proper CAT-6 wiring done perfectly. And probably not even then. I consider myself lucky when I manage 50mB/s (500mb/s, or half-gigabit) transfers over my CAT-5e wiring. -- John McGaw [Knoxville, TN, USA]http://johnmcgaw.com I spent some time testing my network, and you are exactly right. Having the router plugged into the switch did not affect transfer speeds between the gigabit-enabled computers. You are also right about not coming close to gigabit transfer speeds. I moved a file, listed by Windows as 2,189,264 KB, for the test. It took 215 seconds using the gigabit adapters, and it took 267 seconds using the T100 adapters. That is less than a 20% improvement, so I am taking the equipment back to the store. I guess I was thinking it would be 10 times faster, which would be worth it, but a small improvement like that is not. Maybe I could buy new cables and improve the situation, but much of the cable run is behind drywall, so I will just be a little patient while the files transfer and save a few bucks. Thanks for the help. |
#7
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
EdwardATeller wrote:
I spent some time testing my network, and you are exactly right. Having the router plugged into the switch did not affect transfer speeds between the gigabit-enabled computers. You are also right about not coming close to gigabit transfer speeds. I moved a file, listed by Windows as 2,189,264 KB, for the test. It took 215 seconds using the gigabit adapters, and it took 267 seconds using the T100 adapters. That is less than a 20% improvement, so I am taking the equipment back to the store. I guess I was thinking it would be 10 times faster, which would be worth it, but a small improvement like that is not. Maybe I could buy new cables and improve the situation, but much of the cable run is behind drywall, so I will just be a little patient while the files transfer and save a few bucks. Thanks for the help. You're not trying hard enough :-) I played with my two Gigabit equipped computers, and wanted to see what they could do. First step, was to set up a RAM disk on each computer. The purpose of that, is to remove the hard drive performance from the equation. The second step, was the network protocol. I selected FTP as the most likely candidate to give me fat bandwidth numbers. I set up an FTPD on one machine, and a client on the other. By doing that, I was barely able to hit 40MB/sec on a Gigabit link. But that was using Win2K on the computers, and Win2K isn't the best at driving the network. Apparently WinXP can do better. Give it another shot. Even if you don't bother with the RAM disks on either end, FTP should allow you to do better than that. I didn't get to use jumbo frames on my setup, because one of the computers was running ICS at the time (two NICs). And with Win2K holding me back, there wasn't much point anyway. Paul |
#8
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:27:02 -0500, John McGaw
wrote: Oh, btw, you will probably never seen anything like true gigabit transfers despite the name unless your network has proper CAT-6 wiring done perfectly. And probably not even then. I consider myself lucky when I manage 50mB/s (500mb/s, or half-gigabit) transfers over my CAT-5e wiring. Unless the run was exceptionally long or through very noisey areas then CAT5e can carry the bandwidth. Limitations are more often the network chip on the NIC(s), operating system overhead, bus (PCI 32bit/33MHz particularly) bottlenecks, or the source and/or destination media. |
#9
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:38:40 -0500, Paul
wrote: I didn't get to use jumbo frames on my setup, because one of the computers was running ICS at the time (two NICs). And with Win2K holding me back, there wasn't much point anyway. Win2k is not the bottleneck (yet) at 40MB/s. |
#10
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NetGear GA311 GigaBit PCI Adapter
On Feb 26, 9:38 pm, Paul wrote:
EdwardATeller wrote: I spent some time testing my network, and you are exactly right. Having the router plugged into the switch did not affect transfer speeds between the gigabit-enabled computers. You are also right about not coming close to gigabit transfer speeds. I moved a file, listed by Windows as 2,189,264 KB, for the test. It took 215 seconds using the gigabit adapters, and it took 267 seconds using the T100 adapters. That is less than a 20% improvement, so I am taking the equipment back to the store. I guess I was thinking it would be 10 times faster, which would be worth it, but a small improvement like that is not. Maybe I could buy new cables and improve the situation, but much of the cable run is behind drywall, so I will just be a little patient while the files transfer and save a few bucks. Thanks for the help. You're not trying hard enough :-) I played with my two Gigabit equipped computers, and wanted to see what they could do. First step, was to set up a RAM disk on each computer. The purpose of that, is to remove the hard drive performance from the equation. The second step, was the network protocol. I selected FTP as the most likely candidate to give me fat bandwidth numbers. I set up an FTPD on one machine, and a client on the other. By doing that, I was barely able to hit 40MB/sec on a Gigabit link. But that was using Win2K on the computers, and Win2K isn't the best at driving the network. Apparently WinXP can do better. Give it another shot. Even if you don't bother with the RAM disks on either end, FTP should allow you to do better than that. I didn't get to use jumbo frames on my setup, because one of the computers was running ICS at the time (two NICs). And with Win2K holding me back, there wasn't much point anyway. Paul Thanks, but I returned the equipment. The application was to play Hi- Def video files over the network. That probably means using Win XP file transfer, not FTP. The videos just didn't play smoothly, so my thoughts about setting up my DVR in the basement, and serving up the files to the living room, have faded away for now. |
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