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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 10:24 am 
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I was waiting for Light Peak/Thunderbolt to go mainstream but it turns out that fiber optic hubs and cables and PCI boards are not only around but pretty damn inexpensive!

4 port fiber optic switch $110
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-DGS-3204-m ... B0035YYJQ4

30 meter cable $35
http://www.amazon.com/30M-Lc-lc-Fiber-O ... B000K15V0I

PCI Fiber Optic card $90
http://bestofferbuy.com/Eidmax-Gigabit- ... aign=gbase

I have no USE for it but I was amazed that it was in the realm of affordability...

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 2:17 pm 
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This is great. I've been waiting for the fiber prices to come down. Last year I got some scrap runs of 24 strand fiber from work that I would just need to run and terminate. I'll need to look into it. But I also wanted to do a 10gig backbone. I've been running a gigabit backbone over Cat5e since late 2001 and would really like another ten times increase like when I went from 100mb/s to 1000mb/s.
But the 10G products are still high.

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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2011 3:05 pm 
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As far as Gigabit speeds go, the only advantage fiber has over copper is distance. Once 10G devices come down in price, that will be a whole different story.


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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 9:18 am 
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Cripes, the 10Gb fiber stuff is way out there is cost... $3,500 just for the PCI network card...

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?s ... 2Fcompshop

I think we should keep this thread down to 1Gb stuff! Besides, there is no way a home user could see any sort of difference between the two.

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PostPosted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 9:40 am 
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Yes that is still too high. I wonder how much 2Gb copper devices are? I would consider that. But for 1Gb it seems like a waste. I've been running gigabit over copper for ten years now and gigabit copper hardware is very cheap now.

At least I have the fiber to use when I'm ready.

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PostPosted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 2:33 pm 
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What I would like to find out is if 1Gb fiber would actually RUN at 1Gb? The highest I have ever seen my copper 1Gb Base-T network speed in a real world application is 500Mb/sec (over Cat 5 no less). That is with two very fast computers with 8GB+ memory (with older computers and less memory it was about 20-30% slower-same routers, switches, and cable). Usually the network loafs along at 100Mb/sec or less while streaming or transferring small files.

Now I really have no idea where the slowdowns occur to prevent higher speeds. I suspect it is still in the computers. Hard drives for instance are still very sluggish in comparison to the rest of the system (REAL obvious once I stuck in an SSD drive). With a fiber to fiber backbone, it may be real zippy. Who knows?

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 8:46 am 
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I am sure that the bottle neck is the hard drive(s). you should be able to get 80% of you network connection without any problems. Try downloading a program like iperf to your computers and using that. It is a small command line based application that will test the network speed.

It is very unlikely that 10G speed are needed for a home server. Even streaming high quality video only requires 55 Mbps (that is 50 GB for a 2 hour movie). So you could have multiple streams and still not be pushing anywhere near the limit of gigabit.

If you really need more bandwidth, get a NIC that has dual ports and can bond them together. You should get higher speeds for a much better price.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:04 pm 
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John Pombrio wrote:
What I would like to find out is if 1Gb fiber would actually RUN at 1Gb? The highest I have ever seen my copper 1Gb Base-T network speed in a real world application is 500Mb/sec (over Cat 5 no less). That is with two very fast computers with 8GB+ memory (with older computers and less memory it was about 20-30% slower-same routers, switches, and cable). Usually the network loafs along at 100Mb/sec or less while streaming or transferring small files.

Now I really have no idea where the slowdowns occur to prevent higher speeds. I suspect it is still in the computers. Hard drives for instance are still very sluggish in comparison to the rest of the system (REAL obvious once I stuck in an SSD drive). With a fiber to fiber backbone, it may be real zippy. Who knows?


The fiber cables are capable of much more bandwidth. The usual bottleneck is the BUS for the interface.

The reason higher speeds work well in a network environment is because of the way the data is distributed. On a "home" network, the PC hardware would definately be the bottleneck.


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PostPosted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:41 pm 
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Yeah, does not really matter as to the actual speed of the wired network. 100Mps would probably work just as well as 1G in pretty much all the stuff I would do at home. Really is a mute point until we get some streaming necessary to Super Duper Ultra high Blu Ray High def signal (like 4K). But then all my stuff in the house would be obsolete anyways...

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 12:42 pm 
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John Pombrio wrote:
What I would like to find out is if 1Gb fiber would actually RUN at 1Gb? The highest I have ever seen my copper 1Gb Base-T network speed in a real world application is 500Mb/sec (over Cat 5 no less). That is with two very fast computers with 8GB+ memory (with older computers and less memory it was about 20-30% slower-same routers, switches, and cable). Usually the network loafs along at 100Mb/sec or less while streaming or transferring small files.

Now I really have no idea where the slowdowns occur to prevent higher speeds. I suspect it is still in the computers. Hard drives for instance are still very sluggish in comparison to the rest of the system (REAL obvious once I stuck in an SSD drive). With a fiber to fiber backbone, it may be real zippy. Who knows?

I have no issue getting 900mb/s+ throughput on my gigabit network. Even back in late 2001 with my slow IDE hard drives I got over 500mb/s throughput.

Sent from my HTC Incredible using Tapatalk

EDIT: I'm pretty much at the limit with my unmanaged gigabit network at home. I have around seventy devices and I've physically separated things as much as i can so data transfers don't impact others. But I'm starting to have issues now with some newer devices since I have been unable to keep some of the devices on it's own section of my network.

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PostPosted: Thu Nov 24, 2011 12:15 pm 
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I bought a new home recently and all they had pre-installed was Cat5e. I really wish they would think about future proofing things more and including fiber runs or at least Cat6.


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2012 3:59 pm 
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sgip2000 wrote:
As far as Gigabit speeds go, the only advantage fiber has over copper is distance.


Fiber is also allot more fragile. Figures, it's glass - not metal!

Quote:
Once 10G devices come down in price, that will be a whole different story.


Not holding my breath. And most PC's haven't been able to saturate a 100 let alone gig link until just recently...

Now a 10 gigabit uplink to my server from a 48 port switch - sure :)


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2012 4:03 pm 
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John Pombrio wrote:
Now I really have no idea where the slowdowns occur to prevent higher speeds. I suspect it is still in the computers. Hard drives for instance are still very sluggish in comparison to the rest of the system (REAL obvious once I stuck in an SSD drive). With a fiber to fiber backbone, it may be real zippy. Who knows?


It's probably a combination of your computer hard drive, the consumer NIC in your machine thats not very efficient and general network design. For example, if the devices doing large transfers and your switch all support the same settings for jumbo frames, and you copy large files and not millions of small files, you could see your utilization jump to above 70% easy. Cheap switches can also be the bottlneck in your LAN - check for reviews online that have benchmarks for maximum throughput. Some are REALLY bad (like why did they bother advertising gigabit in the first place)

Ethernet is never going to get 100%, but you do have some room for improvement.


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2012 4:06 pm 
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DuncanIdaho wrote:
I bought a new home recently and all they had pre-installed was Cat5e. I really wish they would think about future proofing things more and including fiber runs or at least Cat6.


If 1% of the home population ever had a need or were even a fanatical nut like some of us in this forum and installed fibre I would be shocked.

I wish home builders would just pull the flipping cable even if they don't terminate it.

Indeed, in commercial spaces I'm involved with, I'll often convince people to put the fibre cable in the walls - especially if it's new/complete gut job. The cost of the cable is negligible, it barely bumps the labor cost and once in the walls it's there. The real cost - especially with fibre - is terminating the ends. If you do eventually need fibre, at least it's in the walls.

But installing the cable and terminating it on speculation alone? That's someone with money burning hole in a pocket :beerme:


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