I was just pondering this. I currently have all 100mbps switches/routers/hubs. All of the endpoints I'm using have GigE cards in them though, including the UnRaid Server.

 

Can anyone speak to the performance gains I would see if I swapped out my routers (that Linksys WRT350N http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Promotion_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1154659473565&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper that is just coming out has my interest)?

 

I mean in the end is it worth it or is the improvement minimal? I don't have problems streaming media (and HD seems to max out at about 80% of 100mbps), but would like the managameent (copying file too/from UnRaid and moving them beween disks vor Windows/SMB) to be as efficient as possible.

 

To get GigE, I'm probably looking at haveing to buy a router and 2 switches, prob $200-250 total layout. That's without hardware that supports jumbo frames (beaucoup bux from what I understand).

 

Thoughts anyone?

You might not need to spend quite so much. You can connect a GigE switch to your existing router and then connect all your GigE endpoints to the switch.

 

It's unlikely that the Internet connection which goes into your current router requires more than 100mbps, so it's only the switch portion of the router you need to upgrade. I bought a cheap SMC 8505T 5 port switch, which supports jumbo frames, although I admit I've never tried that feature. It's just connected to one of the ports on my Belkin router (which is horrible, but that's another story). The router still handles NAT and DHCP. The other thing is to ensure your cabling is at least Cat 5e. Apparently Cat 5 might work, but Cat 5e is recommended.

 

I seem to recall a posting by Tom (I think on avsforum) which said that jumbo frames had very little impact on throughpu (but that was pre-Version 3 UnRaid).

 

Unfortunately I never measured throughput before the GigE switch, but I've read that throughput is generally about 3 times faster with GigE (although of course I can't find any reference to this now).

Provided you have Gigabit ethernet on your PCs and router, it makes a significant impact.  I did some tests here (both with the same server, the only difference being the speed of the network connection) and the server performed an average of  318% faster on the Gigabit Ethernet connection (switch, unRAID server and receiving workstation all have to be Gigabit Ethernet, of course, for this to have a meaningful benefit).

 

The minimum % improvement was 29% for 1GB read rates.

The maximum % improvement was 533% for 256MB write rates.

 

Note that on my gigabit connection it takes about a minute to transfer a 1GB file.  500% equals 5 minutes less wait time for every Gigabyte you are transferring!  I think that constitutes a fairly important difference.

 

While I say that, I did similar benchmarks on one of the Hawking Technologies canned HNSAS1 NAS units that you can buy at retail (you supply your own hard disk).  These units have 100MBit LAN ports.  I even outfitted mine with a high performance seagate barracuda 7200 RPM hard disk (7200.10).  Even at 100Mbit, my unRAID server is nearly 5x faster than the Hawking NAS, so the 100Mbps performance isn't bad (at least not by consumer standards)... it just gets blown away by the gigabit ethernet performance.

 

I have detailed benchmarks of the new system posted in the HARDWARE forum.  Your mileage may vary depending on the performance of your server.