Gigabit Ethernet

Prepare for Gigabit Ethernet networking
By Brian M. Posey, TechRepublic, March 19, 2003 -- Good article explaining some of the pitfalls about the move to gigabit ethernet.

So I'm getting ready to switch over to Gigabit Ethernet both here at home and at work. Netgear makes an 8 port hub that is only $600 or so (NetGear 8-port Copper Gigabit Switch, GS508TNA) and the ethernet cards are only $125 or so. I've been doing some bench testing of read/write speeds to my local drives vs across the network, and even on an empty (just me and the server) ethernet segment I'm only seeing throughput of 2.0-2.5 Mb/sec when average over a 5 minute interval. The servers on the other hand are able to provide 8-20 Mb/sec reads and 4-12 Mb/sec writes (IDE drives, SCSI drives are 40-50 Mb/sec read and 6-10 Mb/sec writes).

My goal for the office is to switch over to gigabit between the hubs with gigabit to the servers.