Gigabit networking question

[paymaster]

Okay I've been asked to evaluate the capabilities of gigabit networking for backup routines in a entreprise environment.

my first tests consisted of file transfers between two average machines equipped with gigabit NICs from 3com. After realising the hard drives were too weak to obtain fast speeds ( i was getting barely 130mbit) I changed my test subjects to "slightly better ones" :D

Namely a dual xeon system running quad hot swap sATA drives . in this case a RAID 0 of seagate 7200.7 120gig drives, running win2003 and the other machine is a 3.2ghz p4 with a RAID 0 of 36gb 10krpmsATA WD raptor drives (running XP pro). the current transfer speed averages between 350 at 400mbit. which is much greater than before. Now question remains, can it go higher? both systems tested write speeds on hard disk above 70MB/sec. so that would not be a bottleneck anymore.

I heard about operating systems being an issue with winXP especially not being designed for gigabit transfer, is there any tweaking that could be done? Or is that kind of speed what we should settle for. thanks.

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by paymaster
I heard about operating systems being an issue with winXP especially not being designed for gigabit transfer, is there any tweaking that could be done? Or is that kind of speed what we should settle for. thanks. Yeah, if you put a Giga Switch and a Giga NICs in two regular Computers with WinXP you get about 20% more bandwidth.

WinXP is an excellent end user OS but it was designed in the previous Century and not yet optemized for Giga.

Solution? Tweak to WinXP, I do not thing so

Win2003 server does much better with Giga (as you notice).

Some people use Win2003 server for regular computing.

http://www.msfn.org/win2k3/

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