Gigabit prices hit the mainstream

So, if you haven’t totally wireless-ized your computer setup yet, I’ve got a great excuse for you not to do it. Or at least to leave some wires hanging around for special occasions.

Cheap gigabit switches and NICs, that’s what.Right now you can buy gigabit NICs for $10 after all the rebates, and a 5-port switch is about $20. If they’re not on sale this week, wait until next week or the week after. At the very least, there will be sales around Halloween, Thanksgiving, and throughout December.

The nice thing about gig is that the speed of networked drives approaches that of local drives. Thanks to overhead and all that, it might not quite be native speed, but it will be very close. Copying files and making backups becomes much faster and easier. In a multi-computer house, instead of fighting over which computer gets the new half-terrabyte drive, any computer with a wired connection can share it.

So if I were building a network from scratch for someone, I’d go with a combination route. Start off with an 802.11g wireless router for the remote reaches of the house (possibly even one of the 108-megabit "Super-G" routers for faster local data transfers), then put a gigabit switch in the office or wherever multiple computers reside so they could share data at blinding speed. I wouldn’t bother wiring the entire house, but if there are two adjacent rooms each with computers, I might wire both of them so they could enjoy a high-speed connection.

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4 thoughts on “Gigabit prices hit the mainstream

  • September 18, 2005 at 1:27 am
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    Darn you!

    (thanks, man!)

  • September 19, 2005 at 8:28 am
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    Got any brands/models for those NICs or switches that you particularly like ? Any to stay away from ?

    • September 19, 2005 at 10:41 pm
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      Netgear was what I saw on sale; it’s been a good while since I saw a brand of NIC or switch that I especially disliked. All I can say is if you’re running remote backups with Backup Exec, expect it to fail 100% of the time if you’re using consumer-grade switches (D-Link, Netgear, Linksys, etc.). If you’re sharing an Internet connection or the other things people typically do at home, it’s relatively safe to just buy on price as long as your OS supports whatever NIC you bought.

  • September 20, 2005 at 2:38 pm
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    I bought the SMC 8505T five-port gigabit switch a few months ago because it fully supports jumbo frames technology. Fortunately, many of the Intel 865 and 875 motherboard chipsets include Intel’s Pro/1000 network technology, and Linux drivers are available to support jumbo frame transfers. The main reason I wanted gigabit networking was for DVD data transfer between my fileserver and MythTV Linux systems. Jumbo frame allows lower CPU utilization during larger file transfers.

    Here’s an epinions.com review of the SMC eight-port switch, describing the jumbo frames support:
    Epinions.com

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