Multiple network cards on a single PC

Hi everyone,
I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
(basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP (DCHP?
Can never remember which way round it is ).

would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?

Thanks for your help!

Simon Finnigan wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP (DCHP?
> Can never remember which way round it is ).
>
> would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?
>
> Thanks for your help!
>

12.5 megabytes per second is the maximum for a 100Mbps network. If you
install two network cards, I would assume that whichever offers the
faster connection is used (under Windows XP at least) - for example I
have a wireless router, and a wireless network card in my desktop PC and
also in a laptop. If I then connect the two PCs via their 10/100
ethernet ports (with all the wireless stuff still connected and active),
then only the wired connection is used when I transfer data between the two.

--
[ste]
Your Play Rank: MADAMADA ikuyo-

"Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP

I think you need support in both the operating systems of the machines and
switches to do it properly. It certainly isn't simply a case of plugging the
extra hardware in, which will probably result in one of the links being
completely ignored for data transfer.

The simplest solution is to move to gigabit Ethernet, which is not too
expensive these days. This should give a larger improvement anyway.

> (DCHP? Can never remember which way round it is ).

You were right the first time: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.

Alex

Alex Fraser wrote in
(E-Mail Removed):

> "Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly
>> move large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion
>> seems to saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to
>> improve this.

If your 100 Mbps LAN is saturating at 5-6 MBps (ie about 50-60 Mbps) then
it's probably running fairly close to capacity. On my network I've got two
modern XP PCs and an older Win 98 PC. If I simultaneously copy from XP1 to
XP2 and XP1 to W98, I can achieve bursts of about 70% (70 Mbps / 7 MBps)
with typical values of about 50%. With just XP1 to XP2, I get about 60% peak
and 40% typical. Interesting to compare the copying speed from XP1 to W98
depending on whether I copy to the original 8 GB disk or a newer 40 GB disk
in the W98 PC - evidently the 40 GB disk is faster because the network
transfer rates are typically about 30% rather than about 15%. All figures
are measured from the network monitor in Task Manager on XP1.

In article <(E-Mail Removed)>, (E-Mail Removed)
says...
> Hi everyone,
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP (DCHP?
> Can never remember which way round it is ).
>
> would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?
>
You could try this on the PCs

http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php?id=951

but I'm not sure how the switches will cope with a double uplink
connection. I have the germ of an idea that might provide a workaround
for this problem but it's not yet fully developed ...

"Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi everyone,
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP
(DCHP?
> Can never remember which way round it is ).

1 your net is not saturated at this speed (assuming no other transfers, and
that everything runs at 100M full duplex) - so upping the thruput probably
wont help.
- i suggest you get a test utility such as ttcp that doesnt use disk etc and
find out if the net is a bottleneck or not.

2 there are schemes for "link aggregation" that can "team "2 net adaptors
for higher thruput and / or resilience- typically supported on servers -
intel cards used to come with this.....
some of the schemes just work on a wintel box, others need co-operation from
the switch
they all seem to workby allocating "connections" to different cards, so are
really only going to help if you have a server style stetup, with lots of
devices connecting to shared servers.

3 as someone else mentioned - Gig is cheap (although a lot of cards cant
handle more than a couple 100 Mbps - but still several times what you get
now)
also you need fast PCs, quicker versions of PCI bus etc to get close to 1000
Mbps thruput.

4 disk dominates PC to PC thruput - unless you have seriously fast disks /
RAID / loads of memory for cache, what dominates for file trasfers is disk
speed.
There are 3 disks in my main machine (just for more storage), and the
fastest gives more than double the thruput of the slowest - 2 are 120G, 1 is
60G. different controllers also alter the performance.
Fastest gives around 30 Mbyte/s thruput for raw drive copy - but uses 100%
CPU on a 1.2G AMD cpu. running programs, swapping, and seeks to do file
copies can lose 80% of that....

5 does it matter?
if you run w2k or xp, then transfers can happen in the background for bulk
data
even streaming video shouldnt need more than 5 Mbps or so

>
> would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?
>
> Thanks for your help!
--
Regards

(E-Mail Removed) - replace xyz with ntl

"Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi everyone,
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP
(DCHP?
> Can never remember which way round it is ).
>
> would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?

As other posters have mentioned, while this is a good idea, it
can't easily be made to work.
If the machines are relatively close and running XP, you could
consider networking them using firewire (IEEE1394) which I
successfully use between the 2 machines (15 metres apart) that
I transfer data between the most (the rest are all on 100Mbps
ethernet and these 2 also use 100Mbps ethernet for their
internet connection.)
I get real and sustained speeds of 30+Megabytes/sec using data
files of several GB in size and CPU overhead is much lower than
when using ethernet (inc gigabit) cards, so data can be transferred
in the background without really affecting any foreground applications
running on either machine (unless said apps access the same physical
HDs that the data is going from/to). Not exactly easy to setup though,
particularly if *all* machines need to see each other using ms simple
filesharing.
HTH
--
Rob

Simon Finnigan <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I've got a few PC's conneced over a 100 meg network, and I regularly move
> large amounts of data between the machines. The connecion seems to
> saturdate at 5-6 megabytes a second, and I've like to improve this. If I
> where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put an extra
> network cable between the two switches the machiens are connected to
> (basically doubling everything in the connection up), would this make the
> connection run quicker? The network is given IP addresses by a DHCP (DCHP?
> Can never remember which way round it is ).
>
> would this work, or are there massive problems with doing this?
>

Wouldn't it be almost as cheap nowadays to upgrade to Gigabit network
cards and switch? That makes the set up side of things trivial, no
change from the present system.

--
Chris Green

"Rob Hemmings" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:djl8g5$cnr$(E-Mail Removed)...
> "Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> > If I where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put
> > an extra network cable between the two switches the machiens are
> > connected to (basically doubling everything in the connection up),
> > would this make the connection run quicker?
[snip]
> If the machines are relatively close and running XP, you could
> consider networking them using firewire (IEEE1394) [...]
> I get real and sustained speeds of 30+Megabytes/sec using data
> files of several GB in size and CPU overhead is much lower than
> when using ethernet (inc gigabit) cards [...]

Can you quantify the CPU overhead?

Alex

"Alex Fraser" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> "Rob Hemmings" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:djl8g5$cnr$(E-Mail Removed)...
> > "Simon Finnigan" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> > news:(E-Mail Removed)...
> > > If I where to put an additional network card in each machine, and put
> > > an extra network cable between the two switches the machiens are
> > > connected to (basically doubling everything in the connection up),
> > > would this make the connection run quicker?
> [snip]
> > If the machines are relatively close and running XP, you could
> > consider networking them using firewire (IEEE1394) [...]
> > I get real and sustained speeds of 30+Megabytes/sec using data
> > files of several GB in size and CPU overhead is much lower than
> > when using ethernet (inc gigabit) cards [...]
>
> Can you quantify the CPU overhead?

Will do so tonight and report back. ISTR it changed from
~25-30% to ~8-12% but that was a year or so ago, and
my memory may be (read *is*!) suspect.. I've since flogged
my gigabit NICs, so comparison will be using onboard 100Mbps
ports vs onboard firewire (both ends = A7N8X del 2.0)
--
Rob