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Im very sorry if my title doesn't make any sense,

basically i have a wired network in my house, and its all linked with a linksys router/modem, which is only 100mb.

i would like to upgrade to gbit, im wondering can i do that by doing the following:

purchase switch, plug all machines into switch, then link switch to router/modem. (will i gain speed or will it be the same becasue of router?)

im really sorry if that made no sense at all.

:whistle:

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If I remember correctly, your network is only as fast as the slowest component. In this case, your 100mbit router.

I actually do have a gigabit switch, but my current router is only 100mbit, so the fastest connection I can get is 100mbit (which, while much slower than gigabit, is fast enough for most internet connections and still fast enough for local networks imo).

  On 05/06/2010 at 23:34, Optimash Prime said:

ah i see, so the most sensible option if i were to do this, is to invest in a Gbit router :shifty:

Pretty much....I just recently switched to the router I have now which can run Tomato firmware (which is a godsend compared to default Linksys firmware) but is limited to 100mbit, sadly I do not think there are are gigabit routers which Tomato firmware supports, so it will be awhile before I upgrade to a Gbit router myself...

  On 05/06/2010 at 23:24, Nagisan said:

If I remember correctly, your network is only as fast as the slowest component. In this case, your 100mbit router.

Not true.

I have a WRT300N router, 100mbit. and a Netgear Gigabit Switch.

All of my systems are plugged into the Gigabit switch, all of my local systems on that switch operate at 1Gb connections. The router is uplinked to the switch, and it operates at 100mbit, which is fine, since my WAN connection is only 30Mbit down max.

  On 05/06/2010 at 23:17, Optimash Prime said:

purchase switch, plug all machines into switch, then link switch to router/modem. (will i gain speed or will it be the same becasue of router?)

This will work just fine for all machines plugged into the gbit switch.

  On 05/06/2010 at 23:41, xendrome said:

Not true.

I have a WRT300N router, 100mbit. and a Netgear Gigabit Switch.

All of my systems are plugged into the Gigabit switch, all of my local systems on that switch operate at 1Gb connections. The router is uplinked to the switch, and it operates at 100mbit, which is fine, since my WAN connection is only 30Mbit down max.

This will work just fine for all machines plugged into the gbit switch.

How exactly does that work? The router is still defining local IP addresses and routing traffic (unless I misunderstand switches), I tried manually setting my Ethernet port to gigabit and it defaulted back down to 100mbit, despite my computer (and all computers on my network) being plugged into a gigabit switch.

While it is true that a wireless network will generally slow to the speed of the slowest device, the wired connection between any two computers will be limited by the slowest device in the path between those computers. So if you have two computers with gigabit network cards connected to the same gigabit switch, then you'll be transferring files between the two at gigabit speeds. The link to your internet connection will be limited to 100 mbps with your router, but this shouldn't be a problem unless you have a super fast fiber connection. (If this is the case, your 100mbps router probably can't translate packets from the wan side to the lan side of the router at 100mbps and you may wish to upgrade to get your money's worth out of your internet connection. I've seen this with a Linksys WRT-54GL on a 50mbps fiber connection--that router just couldn't process packets as fast as that connection was able to provide them...)

"The router is still defining local IP addresses and routing traffic (unless I misunderstand switches)"

The router is only routing traffic OFF your network - there is no routing going on for machines on the same segment. As to defining IPs -- thats just the dchp server running on the router, it could just as easy run on one of your machines, or you could set static, etc. etc. So clearly you misunderstand something.

As to your computer not being able to run gig -- what cable are you using? Could be something wrong with it as well..

The router has nothing to do with the speed of of the devices talking to each other connected to the gig switch.

Hmmm.....after researching it myself it seems that generally yes, a gbit switch which connects all devices will give you gbit speeds between those devices no matter what the router does.

Oddly enough, I get 100mbit speeds between my 2 main computers even when I go into the network adapter properties and manually put them in 1.0 Gbit mode......anyone have any thoughts as to why? (both computers have gbit ethernet cards, and the only device between them, my switch, is a gbit switch)

The cables are all standard cat 5e, none are in bad physical condition, all store-bought so they are wired correctly.

The transfer speeds I get between 2 computers is only around 10-11 MB/s max, which is right around what you would expect for 100mbit.

EDIT: Actually it seems it was my fault entirely. Due to my earlier thinking, I had my two main computers plugged into the router directly instead of the switch, which limited transfer speeds to what the router was capable of. After switching both over to the switch instead, I now transfer locally at 40+ MB/s due to the gbit speeds, and my adapter according to Windows now properly shows the 1.0 Gbps speed instead of 100mbit.

As Budman said, there is no routing being completed on the same VLAN segment, the switch and local host will 'lookup' the IP address and match it to a MAC address and place it in a table so that the hosts can connect directly to each other going through the switch.

Anything going outside the network range of the machine will be pushed to the default gateway and directed to the correct network.

So if you connect all machines to the gig switch they will be running at a gig if the devices and cable are gigabit compatible.

Yeah, sorry for misinforming the OP, I PMed him alerting him of my mistake in case he closed this thread after my earlier responses. To the others in this thread, thanks for correcting me, not only do I now know a gbit switch will help despite the router for local transfers, but I am now running my local network at 10-fold speeds over what it was (granted the transfer speed is only 4x faster due to HDD limits, though).

Not sure what HDD you have - but yes quite likely they will be your bottle neck on a gig network.

You should be able to see higher than 40MBps though with modern disks.

You can use iperf to test your wire speed, and yes with decent nics and good drivers and nothing hooked into your drivers like vmware drivers, etc. you should see very good wire speed even with cheap or built in nics.

------------------------------------------------------------

[152] local 192.168.1.100 port 62001 connected with 192.168.1.4 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[152] 0.0-10.0 sec 1012 MBytes 849 Mbits/sec

Example - robocopy file copy over gig network.

100% New File 699.4 m ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Total Copied Skipped Mismatch FAILED Extras

Dirs : 1 0 1 0 0 0

Files : 1 1 0 0 0 0

Bytes : 699.44 m 699.44 m 0 0 0 0

Times : 0:00:11 0:00:11 0:00:00 0:00:00

Speed : 62825040 Bytes/sec.

Speed : 3594.877 MegaBytes/min.

Ended : Sun Jun 06 08:24:02 2010

Here's my results:

------------------------------------------------------------

Client connecting to 10.0.0.127, TCP port 5001

TCP window size: 2.00 MByte

------------------------------------------------------------

[148] local 10.0.0.2 port 52653 connected with 10.0.0.127 port 5001

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth

[148] 0.0-10.0 sec 1.05 GBytes 899 Mbits/sec

My HDDs are rather old (the one I was transferring from/to in my computer is over 5 years old) so I am not really surprised by only getting around 40MB/s, its still tons better than topping out at maybe 11MB/s.

I got my house wired with CAT 5e+, and bought one of these switches:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817111014

Since it is a Gigabit switch, everything in my house (Xbox 360, PS3, HP MediaSmart Home Server, all computers) run at Gigabit speeds. It is an unmanaged switch, so there was no programming to do whatsoever, just plugged it in and it is ultra-fast. Any LAN configuring I need to do is done through my wired/wireless router, which I plugged into port 24 on the switch. It provides IPs to all my devices, including my iPhone and iPad, and it houses my LAN's firewall. Before I was just running a 5-port 10/100 wired/wireless Linksys switch. I am VERY happy with my network now.

Hope this helps!

Tim

post-3923-12758361645672.jpg

Hey Nagisan did you set that 2Mbyte window size or did it default to that?? Nice speeds though ;)

Yeah sure looks like your drives your bottleneck most likely with those wire speeds, but can not complain about 40MBps with 5 year old disks ;)

  On 06/06/2010 at 15:05, BudMan said:

Hey Nagisan did you set that 2Mbyte window size or did it default to that?? Nice speeds though ;)

Yeah sure looks like your drives your bottleneck most likely with those wire speeds, but can not complain about 40MBps with 5 year old disks ;)

I probably set it.....I copied the command off a tutorial on how to use iperf though, had no clue what the command(s) actually did (other than run iperf) so I just used that.

  • 6 months later...
  On 06/06/2010 at 14:56, Optimash Prime said:

this is great news :D.. i shall pick myself up a switch :laugh:

@ RottGutt, the ps3 has gbit port?.....

Very sorry for not replying months ago... Yes, the PS3 has a Gigabit Ethernet port, 10/100/1000.

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