When I connected two pcs with ethernet crossover, the best data transfer rate I got was 4.67 megabytes per second, which is far below the 100 megabits/sec standard. Details: I transferred a bunch of text, audio and picture files in a folder, totalling 2.67GB and divide by 430 seconds actual time taken to transfer from pc1 to pc2. Even after calculating from MB/sec to mbps, my actual result was still way far below expected ethernet 100 mbps standard. I was wondering what is the highest rate you would get if you link a Cat.6 ethernet crossover cable between the gigabit ethernet adapter on each pc. Did you in actual experience ever get even half the gigabit speed? I would appreciate receiving comments on your experience. Thanks.

The speeds you encounter were probably more a factor of the hard drives being used than the network connection. Even though drives use ATA100/133 and the newer SATA150, the drives themselves cannot actually saturate that much bandwith. There are some gains with small transfers due to burst transfer rates and the hard drive amount of cache. But, when dealing with large transfers, a drives sustained transfer rate is what matters. Plus, how fragmented are the two drives that you were using? Any background applications, especially ones that read or write to the disks, will also have an effect on the trnsfer. So, you will most likely see no benefit from using GigaBit ethernet. You would get better results if you were to be using striped raid arrays on both computers that are separate from the OS drive. Michael J

10mb/100mb/1000mb all refer to bandwidth not speed. In other words the higher the number the more lanes of traffic. You only put one car on the gigabit freeway. Bet you expected your 2.67gig of files to copy over in 2.67 seconds. Doesn't work that way. Sorry.

One of the tests on PCPitStop determines the read/write speeds of your hard drives. If I had to guess I would say they are somewhere around 4.67mbps. Their tests are safe but require you to install their plugin. Regards, Bryan

Thanks for your replies. Bryco: Do you remember what rpm of HDD did the estimated 4.67 mbps speed come from?

Hi, I bought also two GB ethernet. Local copy of the file requires ~0.75 + 2.6 sec (cp and sync), while over a cross over cable it is 8 seconds. on the other machine, the file copy requires 2.2 + 5.4 (cp and sync). So my server HD is too slow, but I'm changing to a SATA controller, let's see then. So it looks like, that the write is too slow, at last currently :-). thanks, Robert When you're traveling at the speed of light, don't trip