gigabit nics only transfering at 9000kb/s

st4rk

Gawd
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Sep 19, 2003
Messages
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I have two comps, one has an onboard gigabit nic, the other has a gigabit nic standalone from lanready. They are connected to each other using a cat5e crossover cable.

I am using winxp to transfer files between the two. Both cards are set to 1000 full. I transfered a large file at 100mbps, then at 1000mpbs, both transfers were about the same length of time. Curiously, I used a FTP program to see exactly how fast I was transfering. To my dismay the transfers would fluctuate from 7000kb/s to 9000kb/s. At one time it actually burst to 12000kb/s, but only for a second.

When I ftp to my XBOX I manage to xfer around 11000kb/s:eek:. So what is going on here? I have the QoS set to 1% in windows, but that did not fix it. The speeds I am getting are slow, even for 100mbps standards which should theoretically transfer around 12000kb/s (and it does, hence my xbox speeds). So what could be limiting my xfer speeds?
 
I'm a little tired, but perhaps HDD Write sped caoabilities? PCI Bus speed? I'm kinda at a loss :(
 
its pulling a 800m file from a western digital 80gb 8mb cache hd, to a SATA seagate hd. both 7200rpm of course.

keep in mind that i utilize all of the 100mbps potential when I am copying to or from my xbox!

PCI 32bit bus' can transfer at 137mb/s.

not that this matters but machine 1 with the 80gb wd is:

1.7ghz athlon xp
387mb ram

to machine 2 with sata hd:

barton 3000+
1gb ram
 
you dont need a crossover cable, gigabit ethernet does it for you, just use a straight through cable, and your all set.

Have fun
 
Originally posted by Oppy
you dont need a crossover cable, gigabit ethernet does it for you, just use a straight through cable, and your all set.

Have fun
Although I haven't seen a gigabit card that didn't auto-negotiate MDI/MDI-X, I wouldn't assume that it's just standard with all gigabit cards. Unless, that auto-neg IS a part of the 802.3(z?) standard
 
Originally posted by Oppy
you dont need a crossover cable, gigabit ethernet does it for you, just use a straight through cable, and your all set.

Have fun

Ditto.
Just use a straight-thru Cat5e or better cable. The 1000BaseT spec uses ALL 8 conductors rather than just pins 1,2,3 and 6 that 10/100 uses. Using an X-over Cable is forcing Auto-negotiation to 100BaseT.
 
wow, I read about gig last night trying to figure this out and couldn't find that out anywhere. That's pretty interesting the way the protocol does that...

That definitely explains it! Thanks. Time to make a new cable.
 
Originally posted by Oppy
you dont need a crossover cable, gigabit ethernet does it for you, just use a straight through cable, and your all set.

Have fun

I owe you a beer!
I have 2 pcs with GB cards in them but I was waiting to get a good deal on a crossover cable or GB switch. I will try it as soon as I get home.
 
okay, tried the straight through cable but it still went 9000kb/s... tried auto mode, tried manually setting it to 1000full. Still cannot figure this out.

And how is that my problem? I don't see how proc speed or ram would affect the rate. We had a p2 200 with 256mb of ram as a file server for a long ass time at work, and it was perfectly fine.
 
are you using the windows drivers or updated drivers from the manufacturer? if your just using the windows ones, i'd try to update to newer ones from the manufacturere.
 
its a gigabyte mobo, k7

the sata is onboard

I killed qos, only increased it to about 19000 when upping to the crappier computer, but when pulling from the crappier comp it still is at 9000kb/s
 
it is his hard disks. name a HD Drive that supports 200+ MB/sec...

thru PCI BUS....hell, only thing i can think of that supports that NEARLY is FIBRE Channel and U320 Scsi.
 
Originally posted by anotherguy159
What is the transfer rate on your harddrive?

Read speed.

That's your bottleneck.

Read is usually a good deal higher than write speeds. I don't think windows uses a large memory buffer on the receiving end, so the transfer will probably get held up waiting for the disk to finish the writes.
 
Gigabit ethernet doesnt move anything close to 200MB sec, 200Mb's yes, 200MB's no

Now do me a huge favor open your task manager and move the files between the 2 again and tell us what the network utilization says and check the performance while your moving the file also.

BTW, who makes the gigabit ethernet card in the pci slot?
 
You said that you used FTP to check the transfer speed? Well FTP is quite inefficient for Super fast links. It's meant for transferring files over the internet and over slow links. It won't be nearly as fast over a local network as SMB.

Gav
 
so you're trying to tell me that a hard drive cannot write faster than 19000kb/s? I have done benchmarks that prove my hd to be capable of 50000kb/s. Which is normal for ata100.

The network utilization is around 15% for each nic.

What is a good program for smb that I could use?

You people keep forgetting the my XBOX CAN TRANSFER FASTER!!!
When I upload to my xbox it goes as fast as 100mbps will go, same when I am pulling files from it.

The nic is some off brand nic, but they both use the same realtek chips. So they are identical, except one is integrated, the other is in a pci slot. The one in the pci slot is in the amd 2100+ computer with the western digital drive.

I can't believe no one has posted here yet saying "Oh my gigabit at home transfers way faster than that, something is wrong" I seem to be the only one on this forum that is experiencing this!
 
Originally posted by Oppy
Gigabit ethernet doesnt move anything close to 200MB sec, 200Mb's yes, 200MB's no

Now do me a huge favor open your task manager and move the files between the 2 again and tell us what the network utilization says and check the performance while your moving the file also.

BTW, who makes the gigabit ethernet card in the pci slot?


Gigabit 802.xx 1000Mbits per second, x2 for full duplex.
now normally, its 8mb per MB...but we have REAL overhead. so lets raise that to 10mb to equal a MB...

2000mb / 10mb = 200MB.....theoretically. im not one for theoretics.
 
Your hard drive isn't going to be capable of 50MB/s. I hate to break this to you, but contiguous data is not that easy to come by. Even if it is, filesystems have this nasty habit of needing to update more than just the file, meaning you have to go update the filesystem tables, update permission bits, system indicies, etc. ATA100 hard drives operate at about 15-35MB/s in reality, so no, it's not a shocker. And by that I mean most will operate about 15-25MB/s in semi-random write patterns, and 25-35MB/s for contiguous. The only ATA drive that can operate at or above 50MB/s in contiguous xfers is the second generation Raptor.

EDIT: Duplex doesn't double your speed. It allows two cards to talk at once. If only one is xmitting, no gain.
 
Stark...

#1 ATA100 as a spec is theoretically capable of that. The mechanical assemblies however, are not. The only time you're going to hit even close to spec is sending info out from the HDD cache.

#2 The IDE controller and the Gigabit Ethernet controllers both use the SAME PCI bus, so take the theoretical limit and divide it in 2 to begin with, not to mention any other devices that may be talking at that point.

#3 Have you checked for any extraneous software running on both PC's? Is it time to defrag?

Your Xbox Also is running streamlined proprietary software too.
 
Snugglebear said what I was going to say about the duplexing, so no need to go any further with that.

What I should have said was that in his situation he wouldnt see 200MB's a second, hell he wont see 100MBs a second.

Now if the cable in question is just a cat 5 cable vr's a cat5e cable that could be it to but I dunno.
 
I'll find the bench scores for both my hd's.

So basically I am still hearing what I already knew, that hd's don't go as fast as they are rated, and that gig doesn't go as fast as it's rated.

But still leaves me with the problem that I should at least get 20mb/sec on gig, when I am only getting 9mb/sec. And I yet I can get 11mb/sec with my xbox which only runs at 100mbps.

We have some workstations here at work with gig nics in them, I'll see what transfer rates they get.
 
Originally posted by st4rk
I'll find the bench scores for both my hd's.

So basically I am still hearing what I already knew, that hd's don't go as fast as they are rated, and that gig doesn't go as fast as it's rated.

But still leaves me with the problem that I should at least get 20mb/sec on gig, when I am only getting 9mb/sec. And I yet I can get 11mb/sec with my xbox which only runs at 100mbps.

We have some workstations here at work with gig nics in them, I'll see what transfer rates they get.


gigabit does go as fast as its rated. just not with 32bit pci cards, much less while sharing the pci bus with the ide drive it's transferring to.

use an 865 or 875 board, with intels gig nic, and a western dig raptor hard drive, and you'd see a tremendous improvement in performance for a variety of reasons. first, is that if a board mfg uses the intel onboard nic solution, it rides its own bus - meaning it doesnt have to share the pci bus. the onboard sata controller is in the same boat, it's got its own separate link back to the southbridge. hence, traffic coming in or going out will never be competing for bandwitdh. add in the raptor to take care of the higher sustained througput than your existing ide drives.


you should be beginning to see that currently, gigabit doesnt do much on the desktop - 10/100 is plenty given the current setup of most machines. it's in servers, with 64 bit pci slots, or pci-x slots, and u320 raid arrays that you actually gain somehting tangible from gigabit.



do yourself a favor, and don't trust ftp, or windows smb to gauge speeds. go download and run bricks, and come back once you've got the results from a REAL test
 
gigabit does go as fast as its rated. just not with 32bit pci cards, much less while sharing the pci bus with the ide drive it's transferring to.

The SATA hard drive I have is not connected via a pci sata card! It is onboard SATA. The SATA hard drive is in the computer with the Gigabyte mobo that has onboard gig.

The gig NIC that is in a pci slot is in the computer that uses a western digital hard drive on an IDE channel which is obviously built into the motherboard. Therefore I see no reason that any of the hard drives should be interfering with the nics.

What is bricks? Is it a file transfer program? Or just a benchmark and monitoring program?
 
Originally posted by st4rk
The SATA hard drive I have is not connected via a pci sata card! It is onboard SATA. The SATA hard drive is in the computer with the Gigabyte mobo that has onboard gig.

The gig NIC that is in a pci slot is in the computer that uses a western digital hard drive on an IDE channel which is obviously built into the motherboard. Therefore I see no reason that any of the hard drives should be interfering with the nics.

doesnt matter. they may be onboard, but they're still connected using the same old pci bus.

the only exception are intels 865 and 875 chipset boards.
 
Bricks is a network test/diagnostic utility. Basic idea is to spew out traffic to another node on the network and see how much you can fit in the pipe. Since the traffic is just a repeat of a few KB in memory, there's no problem with disk throughput or PCI bus limitations.
 
Here are the specs with my home setup..

Sys #1
Abit NF7-S v2.0
XP 3000+
1024MB Corsair
Intel Pro/1000MT PCI
36GB Raptor Boot
160GB Maxtor SATA
WinXP Pro SP1

Sys#2
Acorp dual P3
2 x 866 P3's
512mb PC133
2x 60GB WD BB's in raid 0
Intel Pro/1000MT PCI

Connected thru an SMC 8 port gigabit switch with jumbo frames enabled on both nics.

Get 30-45MB/sec xfer btw the two using SMB/file sharing.

I'd point the finger at your el crappo nics......also quality cabling makes a big difference....

Intel has an eval program where you can purchase Intel Pro/1000MT adapters for $33 shipped........

Hope that helps!
 
Originally posted by senorpyro
doesnt matter. they may be onboard, but they're still connected using the same old pci bus.

the only exception are intels 865 and 875 chipset boards.

And at that... only the ones labeled with CSA nics have it. There are some weird-ass mobos with PCI gige onboards on them.
 
Originally posted by kleptophobiac
And at that... only the ones labeled with CSA nics have it. There are some weird-ass mobos with PCI gige onboards on them.

yeah, sorry, i didnt mention it in that post, but my previous one i did, i just didn't remember what intel's name for it was.
 
I had never transferred a file TO my xbox, so I was mistaken in my previous posts. When sending files to my xbox it goes a horrid 800-1200kb/s. Yes, KiloBYTES a second. But when I pull from my xbox it will of course go to it's full potential of around 12000kb/s.

Still haven't gotten my gig to go faster than 13000kb/s. I found out that SMB is microsofts file transfer thing. So when I didn't use my ftp program to pull data from one computer to the other, it transferred a 4.2gb file in 5 long minutes. Which comes out to 12500kb/s! Ghey.

Now someone mentioned jumbo frames? I enabled it on one card, but the other one had a choice of mtu size....no idea what to set it to. It ranged from 2-7k MTU for Jumbo frame. I set it to 7k and the file transfer stuck at 18minutes remaining! LOL, guess that didn't help.

Ah well, I'm gonna give up on this until I get the money to get a real gigabit nic.

And when testing the computers at work (compaq workstations) they went about the same speed I am getting, maybe slower.
 
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