Gb ethernet & iMac G5
- Thread starter Whitehill
- Start date
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- networking
Why? There are very few networks outside scientific labs which transport at gigabit speeds. I am betting that you are nowhere near such a network. It makes precious little sense to buy a gigabit network card to transmit over a 10/100 Base-T network.
Whitehill
Registered
Memo to self: Never go to the track with MisterMe.
I am sitting at my Power Mac G5 Quad with two, not one, 1000 Base-T cards, connected to various other pieces of equipment by a Netgear 10/100/1000 switch. My gigabit network is operating just fine, thanks, and I know where it is. Precious little? It makes no sense at all to make stupid statements when it's obvious to all you don't know what you're talking about.
My question still stands. Anyone else?
nixgeek
Mac of the SubGenius! :-)
Simple answer: No.
(Now for the long-winded answer)
Reason is that even if you used Firewire, your nominal speed would be 400 Mbps. Even with Firewire 800, you won't get GigE speeds so it's not practical for a company to offer this underwhelming option when people could just use the already-supplied Ethernet connector on the host. If it doesn't give you true GigE speeds, why would you buy it?
Basically, you would have to physically change the Ethernet controller on that iMac G5 and it would require some soldering expertise to get that replaced since the Ethernet controller is soldered on. You can't "force" it to do something it's not hardwired to do.
You could still use your iMac G5 on that switch and that port would transfer the data at 100 Mb. This won't slow down those hosts connecting at 1 Gb since each port on a switch is a point-to-point connection (unlike a hub which shares the nominal network bandwidth among all the ports and forces hosts to transfer at the speed of the slowest Ethernet connection). About the only thing that would slow down is data transfers between your 1 Gb hosts and that iMac, but the data transfers among the 1 Gb hosts only would be nominally at 1 Gbps (barring any latency on the network).
One more thing: though each switch port is a point-to-point connection to its end-node host, there is one caveat. If your end node from that switch port is a port on a network hub which then feeds other hosts, those hosts on the hub will end up sharing the bandwidth given to the hub by the switch's port and the speed will be determined by the slowest host on that hub.
I hope that clears things up.
As for the practicality of GigE, the only benefit is when you're transferring large data from one host to another and both ends are GigE. Having GigE will not make the internet any faster, as you're limited by how fast your internet connection to your house is. In other words, the iMac G5 connected at 100 Mbps and your GigE hosts will download data from the Internet at the same speed: 2 Mbps. This is why MisterMe said that it's really overkill to have GigE at home, unless you're doing something specialized like transferring large data among GigE hosts on your internal network.
(Now for the long-winded answer)
Reason is that even if you used Firewire, your nominal speed would be 400 Mbps. Even with Firewire 800, you won't get GigE speeds so it's not practical for a company to offer this underwhelming option when people could just use the already-supplied Ethernet connector on the host. If it doesn't give you true GigE speeds, why would you buy it?
Basically, you would have to physically change the Ethernet controller on that iMac G5 and it would require some soldering expertise to get that replaced since the Ethernet controller is soldered on. You can't "force" it to do something it's not hardwired to do.
You could still use your iMac G5 on that switch and that port would transfer the data at 100 Mb. This won't slow down those hosts connecting at 1 Gb since each port on a switch is a point-to-point connection (unlike a hub which shares the nominal network bandwidth among all the ports and forces hosts to transfer at the speed of the slowest Ethernet connection). About the only thing that would slow down is data transfers between your 1 Gb hosts and that iMac, but the data transfers among the 1 Gb hosts only would be nominally at 1 Gbps (barring any latency on the network).
One more thing: though each switch port is a point-to-point connection to its end-node host, there is one caveat. If your end node from that switch port is a port on a network hub which then feeds other hosts, those hosts on the hub will end up sharing the bandwidth given to the hub by the switch's port and the speed will be determined by the slowest host on that hub.
I hope that clears things up.
As for the practicality of GigE, the only benefit is when you're transferring large data from one host to another and both ends are GigE. Having GigE will not make the internet any faster, as you're limited by how fast your internet connection to your house is. In other words, the iMac G5 connected at 100 Mbps and your GigE hosts will download data from the Internet at the same speed: 2 Mbps. This is why MisterMe said that it's really overkill to have GigE at home, unless you're doing something specialized like transferring large data among GigE hosts on your internal network.
Whitehill
Registered
Like backups. Thanks for both answers, although they weren't what I wanted to hear.
nixgeek
Mac of the SubGenius! :-)
That's an excellent reason. Are you backing up to a NAS of some sort?
Sorry the outlook wasn't a bit more pleasant, but it's not a total loss at least. Imagine if the port was dead and you had to do it through wifi!
nixgeek
Mac of the SubGenius! :-)
Kees Buijs
Registered
You could also try to find a gigabit USB connector. Although that would not give you the maximum performance possible on the gigabit network (like FireWire), it will increase performance by a factor of almost 5.
If you lay down cable for gigabit, use cat6 not cat5e (only 125mbit officially).
Good luck, Kees