[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] I have gigs now.. - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Sat, May 27 2006 0:58 bradley

I have gigs now..

Yesterday at the office I used the excuse of a temporarily frozen switch to upgrade our switches to 10/100 to gig switches... and for the first time.. my server popped up with a "Hey I'm now running at 1000 speed"

..now we'll see if I have machines that notice the speed difference.  I don't have everyone running gig cards..but we're getting more and more machines with gig nics.  The switches have IP addresses.. We've gone from a day where these suckers where just boxes that I plugged in and didn't care about.. to where there's a username/password in there.  (and sorry folks .. I changed it from a default of "admin" so you are out of luck).  I made sure that they have IP addresses that are in my static IP address range of 10.0.0.2-10.0.0.9 (I'm still using that old fashioned 4.5 addressing range otherwise it would be a 192.168.16.x range).

And then looking inside the Interface.. dang... I'm looking at a ton of software under the hood these days on those switches.

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# re: I have gigs now..

Saturday, May 27, 2006 12:17 PM by Steve Friedl

I think it's unlikely you'll see much difference. I had a customer with ~25 desktops and a half dozen application servers running on 100mbit *hubs* for years, and upgrading to a 100/1000 mbit switch made no difference anybody could feel or I could measure.

Surprised me a lot.

# re: I have gigs now..

Saturday, May 27, 2006 12:18 PM by Matthew Frahm

So what are YOU using for switches these days?

I notice that Cisco has their new Catalyst Express switches which are SMB-friendly as far as pricing goes.  However, they aren't all gigabit.

# re: I have gigs now..

Saturday, May 27, 2006 3:48 PM by Adam

I believe that there is a truckload of web info out there which looks at current hard disk access speeds, combined with current motherboard bus speeds, and concludes that NIC / switch speeds greater than 100Mbs really have no effect because the hard disks can't shunt info in and out any faster than that (of course switch vendors won't tell you that...).

I think that the speed improvements you get from 1Gbps are usually felt when you have multiple servers (esp in a SAN), and a bank of switches, all running high speed within the data centre.  Not really SBS territory.

Having said that, I think that 1Gbps upgrades are a GOOD IDEA, because they are future-proofing an installation before there is a bottleneck.

# re: I have gigs now..

Tuesday, May 30, 2006 9:07 AM by Jeremy

One area where you will see immediate benefits from your upgrade will be when using My Documents redirection, especially mornings/evenings when most folks are loging in/out simultaneously.