speeding up small office network

[mattmos]

Hi,

I'm setting up a small network for 3d animation and compositing, and need a bit of advice as to the best way to go about setting it up.

I will have one server and two workstations for the time being, and will set up raid on the server (prob raid 0 with an external backup running nightly).

At the moment I have a basic netgear 5 port gigiabit router connecting the 3 machines with cat-6 cable, all 3 run xp32. Transferring files over the network is pretty slow though - a 100 Mb quicktime takes roughly 15 seconds to go across, compared to under a second between different hard drives on the server.

I only have them set up by sharing folders and mapping network drives, so is there a better and faster way to network them together? Should I be looking at windows server 2008? Will upgrading all 3 to windows 7 pro 64 improve the situation at all?

thanks for any advice,
matt

 

[bigredshark]

Sounds like your network is running at 100Mbit (100MB in 15 seconds would be consistent with that), fix that would be a good start...

oh, don't use RAID0, not for business, ever. RAID10 if you need performance.

 

[mattmos]

Thanks for the quick reply - and you're right, some of my cat 6 cables appear not to be cat 6 after all, and are causing those computers to connect at 100Mbs - should have double checked that. Tried swapping the cables round and each pc can connect at 1Gbs using one cable, the other two are slower.

Trip to buy some replacement cables for me. cheers!

In the long run is there any way to set up a faster network than 1 Gigabit per second? Does it get much more expensive? Realtime editing/compositing HD footage is the aim.

Will do some further reading about raid setups...

 

[paradigm]

Thanks for the quick reply - and you're right, some of my cat 6 cables appear not to be cat 6 after all, and are causing those computers to connect at 100Mbs - should have double checked that. Tried swapping the cables round and each pc can connect at 1Gbs using one cable, the other two are slower.

You can run 1Gbps over CAT 5e, easily over the distances you'd be talking in a small office.

In the long run is there any way to set up a faster network than 1 Gigabit per second? Does it get much more expensive?

You'd need network adapters that support teaming, along with managed switches that support teaming also.

 

[mattmos]

Hmm not quite sure why that cable isn't doing the business then, it appears to be cat 5, only 1 metre long. Just won't run faster than 100 Mbs.

Teaming - a bit beyond me atm! And in all honesty can prob get along on a decently functioning Gbs network, comp/editing locally.

cheers

 

[mattmos]

Picked up a cat6 and all 3 are now running at 1Gbs, had to be that cable that I was connecting from the server to the switch originally! Anyway, much better transfer rates all round, ta for the help.