Gigabit!

Gigabit used to be an expensive, and far away dream. Newegg.com now has gigabit cards for $10 (vs the $60-$100 they used to be) and gigabit switches for $50 (vs $200+ previously!). Suddenly gigabit is fairly cheap! I did some research on the cheaper cards Newegg offers, and decided on the GE1000-AXP from GigaFast because Linux supports them fairly well. Three of these little cards arrived arived Monday, and today I got a few minutes to test them out. The GE1000-AXP installed on Mandrake 10.2 without ANY user intervention. I didn't want it using DHCP however, so I did have to assign it a static IP (about 10 seconds and 5 mouse clicks... Linux is just SOOO difficult I'm exhausted).
Normally one would expect about this much performance from the different speed ratings:
(eqn: (10mb * 1,000,000)/(8*1024*1024) or 10 million bits with 8 bits per byte, 1024 bytes per Kilobyte, and 1024 Kilobytes per Megabyte)
10mb = 1.2 megs per second (10.2 minutes per full CD)
100mb = 11.9 megs per second (1.03 minutes per full CD)
1000mb = 119.2 megs per second (6.2 seconds per full CD)

In real life, these speeds are not actually attained. The 100mb interface on my main windows system can do about 8 megs per second, and the 1000mb interface on my Linux workstation can do about 20 megs per second. This is about half as fast as some of the results obtained in this benchmark. I don't know if this is because of the cheapness of the card, switch, or network cable. I am using genica cat 5 (maybe e?) cable, with ends I put on myself, and an eight port Netgear GS608 gigabit switch. Apparently there is also a bottleneck in the PCI bus which limits speeds to well below true gigabit, but some things I've read suggest that this is in the 400mb range. None the less, 20 megs per second is pretty dang fast, and twice as fast as my old network. Interestingly, if I copy files from the server with two systems at the same time, the total bandwidth is about 26 megabytes per second... hmmm.