Originally Posted by
gfunkdave
Note that 1 Gb/s is about 125 MB/s. This is the theoretical max - it's unlikely that a consumer grade switch will yield such a speed.
Consumer grades switches handle it just fine, especially if you're only talking 1-2 streams at that speed (even so, most of them not have enough backplane bandwidth to do a half-duplex connection at that speed on every port; full duplex, somewhat less frequently.)
The NICs and the OS are far more likely to be a problem. Decent NICs and Windows file sharing seem to top out at about 110MB/sec, which if you think about protocol and signalling overhead and latency is pretty darn good.
Originally Posted by
BigLar
If I, say, map the drive on my RAID to my desktop, I talk to it using, what? ... TCP/IP?
Some protocol running on top of TCP or UDP, most likely (both of which run on top of IP). If Windows, probally CIFS (or its older version, SMB.)
The RAID has a static IP, but how does the switch know where to send the data?
It sits and waits for something else to connect.
Does it "ask" and see who responds, and then set up a virtual connection or what? If it's something like that, then, sure, I don't need a router. What if it's a DHCP-assigned IP?
Doesn't matter how the IP is assigned. Once two machines have IPs on the same subnet, they use a protocol called ARP to find one another. That involves a few broadcasts, basically "Hey, is 192.168.0.2 out there?" "Yup, I'm here, my MAC is 12:34:56:78:90:12" after which the first machine knows to send directly to that MAC address for that IP address.
If you're using Windows file sharing, the way it works if your PC sends a TCP connection request to the RAID asking to open a file sharing connection. The RAID only knows that someone at that address is connection, and their credentials (if security is set up.)
Originally Posted by
BigLar
I generally dislike "magic" - I'm never comfortable with stuff that "just works", 'cuz, if it goes south, I'm at a loss as to what to do.
Blow $4 on Amazon and buy this book used (or get it from the library, or do the same for some other basic networking text):
http://www.amazon.com/Internetworkin.../dp/0130183806
...a bit dated, but well-written and hey, a penny + $3.99 shipping for a classic, how can you lose?
The wireless is G, so the laptops are limited to 54 MB/s max (which they'll never see) but they don't use the other computers much anyhow.
802.11G is 54Mb(its)/sec, not 54MB(ytes). With decent cards and good software -- and a good signal -- you should see file transfers around the hypothetical limit of a little less than 6.75MBytes/sec.
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BTW, since ISTR you have said you are still using XP, you may want to look up tunings for the network stack to speed up file transfer... my recollection is that back in the day there were some registry tunings (TCP window size maybe?) that sped up transfers on XP a lot when I went to gigabit (on Vista/7 and most modern Linuxes, they're self-tuning these days.)