19 November 2006 16:34 tonyrogerson

My Gigabit network for £74 - 45Mbytes per second...

Yes, I'm a gadget junky; but I do need to speed for testing and development work.

I run two home built servers and one desktop running x64 windows 2003 server here in my office, why? Well, it allows me to truely play with stuff like database mirroring, iSCSI etc.. and it also gives me some resilience when things go wrong.

Anyway, I installed my new gigabit nic's today, £13 quid each (DLink DGE 530T) and my 8 port gigabit switch (DLINK DGS-1008D) for £48 - I didn't have to change any cables either which is good because putting those dam cat5 connectors on is very frustrating.

If anybody 5 years ago said to me that I'd be running a gigabit network at home for £74 I'd have laughed at them, hey, don't you just love the computing industry! You can get high performance at commodity prices now.... Perhaps I'll run in fibre to see what difference there is in latency compared with my current copper... Perhaps I better thing about upgrading my disk subsystems now too because the network appears to be faster than the disk! In my tests I was writing at 45MBytes per second but only utilising 25% of the bandwidth - hell, grand or what hee hee hee....Big Smile

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Comments

# re: My Gigabit network for £74 - 45Mbytes per second...

20 November 2006 08:36 by Colin Leversuch-Roberts

As it currently stands FC is four times faster than ethernet, however, you'd need a lot of disks, and some pretty heavy queries/data loads to saturate that bandwidth. You can also multiply up the hba's ( until you reach the limit of the pc bus - which is probably the slowest link now ) . something you can't do with ethernet.