pete25 Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 if i purchase a Gigabit pci card and install it on my unraid. will i see a speed increase when i transfer a file from a pc that does NOT have a Gigabit card to my unraid that does? pc - basic 10/100 unraid - Gigabit any other benefits ? or w waste of money because other pcs i use dont use Gigabit connection. also do i need special Ethernet cables to use Gigabit cards? my logic tells me to use Gigabit speeds/benefits both pc's would need to have Gigabit cards. i also use a 3com superstack 3 (model4400) to connect all my ethernet cables. Link to comment
Johnm Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 No. you wont notice anything because your switch is 10/100 and the card would switch down to 100MB. If your switch was gigabit, then yes you would if you were accessing your unraid from more then one PC at a time. then in theory each PC could talk at the full 100MB/s (the first several anyways). back in the day, when Gigabit over copper (it used to be fiber only for a while) was becoming available, we would upgrade the switches and servers and leave the desktops at 10/100. eventually they started to come with built in gigabit NICs. now we are installing 10 gigabit cards in our servers... Link to comment
pete25 Posted October 29, 2011 Author Share Posted October 29, 2011 umm ok then. ill have to get a gigabit switch...expensive probably not worth it for what i use my unraid for (watching films and streaming music.. maybe if i can get a second hand unit of ebay..can i use my normal ethernet cables with gigabit ? iv not long ago bought loads of Ethernet cables to re wire my hole home.be a waste of money if i have to re wire and buy new ones. Link to comment
dgaschk Posted October 29, 2011 Share Posted October 29, 2011 Gigabit switches are $25-$30. http://www.buy.com/sr/searchresults.aspx?qu=gigabit+switch&qxt=home&display=col&suggest=1 Link to comment
chickensoup Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Gigabit switches (and adapters) are pretty cheap and you can use your existing cables. Assuming your cables are CAT5/5E they will be fine, they're rated to ~1gbit. Most people running gigabit now use CAT6 though because it is rated to ~10gbit. You most likely won't see any real difference though. Gigabit is a very noticable difference when copying files but not streaming, your copies will probably change from around 6-8mb/sec to more like 50/70mb/sec, depending on your drives etc. Theoretically 100m/bit can go up to 11mb/sec and 1000m/bit can go up to 110mb/sec but this is under perfect conditions so don't expect those speeds. Edit: Ofc if your other PC is 10/100 then you won't get gigabit speeds, as mentioned above, it is fairly cheap to upgrade each box to gigabit though. Link to comment
Johnm Posted October 30, 2011 Share Posted October 30, 2011 Gigabit switches (and adapters) are pretty cheap and you can use your existing cables. Assuming your cables are CAT5/5E they will be fine, they're rated to ~1gbit. While 1000base-T is rated to run on CAT5. in the real world, especially on older or lower quality cable, we tend to see data corruption and/or dropouts. I would strongly recommend picking up new cables. you can get the very cheap online at places like monoprice.com Link to comment
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