What good do GigaBit LAN connections do for you if...

[Miner]

... all you ever do on a home network is copy files from one machine to another, surf the internet, and maybe run an occasional client (to a database server)?

No games, no bit torrents, ... but maybe a sling box or TiVo in the distant future.

Being realistic in my case, if I copy files, even on 100 M connections, the files copy at about 5% of that speed. There are more that a few things to slow this down from 100 M. On access virus scanning, disk access limitations, etc., etc.

 

[arias]

gigabit LAN

You mentioned LAN, so the improvement would be markedly within your home network LAN, where you mention you copy from one machine to another, I'm assuming with some variation of NFS with your gigabit ports hooked up to a router that supports gigE on its LAN side.

Course, the speed of copying also depends on your storage choices ... SCSI, SAS, SATA, UATA. Still, with gigE you'll still notice a marked improvement.

If you're talking about gigE on the WAN port from your router to your broadband connection, it wouldn't improve a whole lot unless your broadband is fiber. Otherwise, the 10/100 ethernet connection to your broadband modem would render your gigabit WAN port pointless ... at least until your provider steps it up.

 

[Miner]

I do mean on the LAN side only. Given the same PC hardware, I'm suspicious that with on-access virus scanning and HD limitations, substituting giga ethernet won't make any noticable difference whatsoever.

 

[thiggins]

If you move a lot of large files or folders around, gigabit Ethernet is worth it. You could just try an experiment by upgrading to gigabit NICs on two machines, connect them with a CAT5e cable (even CAT5 would do) and run some file transfer tests.

You can get PCI gigabit NICs for under $15 each.

 

[corndog]

With computers from back in the P3 era, you can easily get about 250 megabit speeds copying files from one PC to another. My experience shows that when you cut a wait time in half, it "seems" quite good. So I would suggest that you'd appreciate Gigabit even with that kind of improvement.

With later machines like Athlon64s and Core Duos, you can hit almost 400megabits quite easily while copying from one to another.

With Windows 2008 server on the latest hardware, you can hit almost a full gig.

Bottom line - don't necessarily expect a ten-fold increase over your 100 megabit LAN, BUT remember that you will be quite happy even cutting your transfer times in half or better.

My take - Gig is so cheap nowadays. And the improvement IS worth it.

 

[8steve8]

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=48

I know the article was linked in another thread, but seems very relevant to this discussion..

i heard someone mention PCI gigabit Ethernet cards...

 

[crashnburn]

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=48

I know the article was linked in another thread, but seems very relevant to this discussion..

i heard someone mention PCI gigabit Ethernet cards...

Thanks that was a good read.

 

[Tamarin]

One thing to remember... Ethernet is 100MegaBIT or 1000MegaBIT.... your hard drive performs in MegaBYTES. A 100mbit connection is capable of moving 12.5 MegaBYTES/sec, in a perfect world. A modern hard drive can move 50-70megaBYTES a second, so gigabit is a must for large file transfers.

Tam