Any Networking experts here is and interesting idea

Snowmirage · Post by **Snowmirage** » Sun Aug 29, 2004 9:44 pm

What i as thinking, and im not entirely sure how/if this would work was this. I curently have several PC's, I am running a linksys router off my cable modem and attatched to that router is my dad's PC and a Netgear hub (ds104) via the hubs uplink port. I am going to be setting up my bp6 hopefully, as kind of a HTPC / file server. Would it be possible to install 2 NIC in the bp6 and effective double (or at least significantly increase) the local bandwith? Im not talking about my internet download/upload speeds. Or even to all other PC's on the network. Just the ones attached to that same hub.

Also if this could work, would a hub or a switch be needed? I think i was reading about some feature in windows 2000/ xp that would combine 2 network connections. Is this possible with a typical switch/hub or am I better off saveing some money and getting a few gigabit NIC's and hub.

thanks

Snow

davd_bob · Post by **davd_bob** » Mon Aug 30, 2004 12:30 am

If my thinking is correct...you will benifit from a switch instead of a hub in that situation. I think a hub splits its total bandwidth between connections whereas a switch can produce full speed to all connections. Also I think an NT PC can handle up to 5 NICs, but the software may not be able to take advantage of more then one.

3dcandy · Post by **3dcandy** » Mon Aug 30, 2004 4:08 pm

If you're using a server version of windows...for example Windows 2000 advanced server, you can easily choose which NIC the server uses. However, this doesn't really help your bandwidth unless you are serving stuff from one NIC and using the other to access the internet. However, I don't think this will make any difference to your bandwidth in real terms, as a BP6 probably cannot actually make use of the bandwidth as it ain't really fast enough!

Dave Rave · Post by **Dave Rave** » Tue Aug 31, 2004 6:41 am

I had this in one of my machines, and it would only appear to access data on //bp6-1 via one nic card.
when i took the lan cable out, the machine 'disappeared'. very odd.
just make sure it's a good 100 card and even with several machines, remember, you only access one machine at a time.

Snowmirage · Post by **Snowmirage** » Tue Aug 31, 2004 9:53 pm

So basicly it wouldnt realy make any differance then? Is that just beacuse the BP6 isnt fast enough or would this just not work?

Also here is another question.... when i am transfering large files i notice that (according to taskmanager) i am only useing about 60-75% of my bandwitch (100mb/s) is there something i can do to make use of the full 100 when i am transfering large files?

headseed · Post by **headseed** » Tue Aug 31, 2004 11:34 pm

Not unless you have harddrives that can transfer files at 100MB/second.

Post by **Derek** » Wed Sep 01, 2004 5:40 pm

headseed wrote:Not unless you have harddrives that can transfer files at 100MB/second.

RAID would help.

Snowmirage · Post by **Snowmirage** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 12:37 am

Well I just ordered a raid cardk, and have to WD 40gb drives to put in.

So is there a way to do this in windows xp pro?

3dcandy · Post by **3dcandy** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 4:17 am

I'm sure that QoS (quality of service) has something to do with this....it's in network settings

It *should* limit your bandwidth so the system isn't saturated

Post by **Derek** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 11:47 am

There should also be QoS settings in your router as well.

purrkur · Post by **purrkur** » Fri Sep 03, 2004 6:23 pm

headseed wrote:Not unless you have harddrives that can transfer files at 100MB/second.

Are you talking about the transfer rate of the NIC? Then that would be 100Mbit/sec. Divide that by 8 to get megabytes per second, reduce that number by quite a lot because of TCP overhead, hardware overhead and such and you are getting close to the truth about exactly how much bandwidth you get in reality and not in theory

Putting in another NIC to increase bandwidth is of course possible on your BP6 but I would recommend a RAIDed system using multiple, fast SCSI drives in order to get anything out of it. Just exactly how much it would increase you performance is anybody's guess. If you have the money to buy such hardware then you got the cash to buy a better computer than the BP6 to run them

As for your IDE drives, if you intend to RAID them then put them on a different IDE channel. If they are on the same channel then performance will suck.

PDR60 · Post by **PDR60** » Fri Sep 24, 2004 3:44 am

What you're talking about(in the origial post) Is somthing called NIC Teaming. Its software that will actually multithread the data path between two nics. In otherwords the two nics appear to the rest of the LAN as one device. It will only have 1 ip. It woks much like trunking in Cisco. Server grade nics will do the trick for you. Broadcom makes some pretty good 1000MB nics that you can set up for teaming. Intel and Compaq also can do teaming.

On the throughput side of things..... in order to feed these two nics that are now teamed you will HAVE to run a SCSI raid 5 setup. otherwise the teaming is pretty much a waste of time. For a home user if you runn all Gigabit stuff you'll be more than happy. You won't need any teaming. Dell makes a 24 port gig switch that's not too bad in price. Gig nic cards are as low as $49 for intell. Thats pretty cheap.

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Thu Sep 30, 2004 12:04 am

If you suspect that your hubs & 100Mbps NICs are a choke point on LAN data transfers, you need to eliminate all hubs in favor of switched LAN.
If you are buying a new switch - go with a gigabit ethernet unit.
Linksys has an 8-port for about $125. Put a GBE NIC in your file server for about $25 online (& as many PCs as you can afford). You will not have any more choking from slow LAN traffic.
I recently retired all my 802.11 wireless gear in favor of an all GBE LAN. What an improvement!! Only my laptop is still on wireless - five desktops on GBE & when I browse the LAN there is no hesitation building the list of available resources!! Files move across the LAN at blazing speed.
With current prices 100Mbps H/W has become effectively obsolete