# Typical LAN Speeds?



## Calibretto

Hey everyone. I'm just now starting to use this 2TB NAS box I had laying around and I'm transferring some files to it from my desktop. I've been averaging around 10-11 MB/s transfer speeds, but I'm not sure what the average speed is over a LAN. I have both my desktop and the NAS box plugged into a Linksys WRT54G router.

Can anyone give me some ideas on how fast of transfer speeds I should be getting?


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## linkin

well if your router and computers supported a 1gbps lan you would get some insame speeds!


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## zombine210

well, i'm not an expert on this, but on a typical home network, and considering the wrt54g only has 10/100 ports, your lan bandwidth would be, let me see 100Mb/8 ~ 12.5MB so i think 10~11MB is about right, you know after the packets get those bits at the beginning and ending telling it where it's going and what comes next.


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## canivari

zombine210 said:


> well, i'm not an expert on this, but on a typical home network, and considering the wrt54g only has 10/100 ports, your lan bandwidth would be, let me see 100mb/8 ~ 12.5mb so i think 10~11mb is about right, you know after the packets get those bits at the beginning and ending telling it where it's going and what comes next.




+1


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## tlarkin

ahem....

Disk I/O is always going to be your biggest bottle neck.  Hard drives can only read and write data so fast and your network is faster than them.


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## canivari

tlarkin said:


> ahem....
> 
> Disk I/O is always going to be your biggest bottle neck.  Hard drives can only read and write data so fast and your network is faster than them.



My disks can read and write more than 100mbps..
What about TCP-IP overheads?
In my experience the most you can have from a 100mbps conection running TCP/IP is those 11~12mbps..
The same problem with Universal Serial Buses..


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## tlarkin

canivari said:


> My disks can read and write more than 100mbps..
> What about TCP-IP overheads?
> In my experience the most you can have from a 100mbps conection running TCP/IP is those 11~12mbps..
> The same problem with Universal Serial Buses..



well it is megabit not megabyte....and disk I/O will be an issue especially if you are doing multiple things at once, your hard disk does not perform that fast all the time constantly.


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## canivari

tlarkin said:


> well it is megabit not megabyte....and disk I/O will be an issue especially if you are doing multiple things at once, your hard disk does not perform that fast all the time constantly.



Same problem with 100mbps cable (...doing multiple things at once)
I still cant see where can be a botleneck in the HDDs compared with a 100mbps cable running TCP/IP...


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## tlarkin

canivari said:


> Same problem with 100mbps cable (...doing multiple things at once)
> I still cant see where can be a botleneck in the HDDs compared with a 100mbps cable running TCP/IP...



I probably spoke out of place, but if you have multiple I/Os going on your hard disk greatly reduces it's performance.  Plus, you don't file transfer over TCP/IP if you are using windows you do it over SMB which has lots of overhead in itself, especially SMB 2 which was introduced in Vista.  TCP/IP is the protocol for networking, while SMB is the actual network application that runs on the TCP/IP Application layer of the OSI model to share files, authenticate, and other things like printers or other network devices that support SMB.  Back in the day SMB used to run over IPX networks, which was a considerably slower and inferior protocol to TCP/IP.

Every time you add a process to your computer that is reading or writing from the hard disk you are essentially cutting down on it's performance.  Sure SATA drives can transfer speeds up to 150MBs (that is bytes) per a second over the cable, but that does not mean that your hard drive will be able to output or input that to the disk from that speed.   

When you get into large networking, like SANs and stuff like that that run over fiber disk I/O is the bottle neck.  Now, if you are doing a simple peer to peer network, and only doing 1 file transfer, well disk I/O will probably not come into play as much as I was implying.   However, having a faster hard disk, or say running an array (RAID) will increase data throughput.


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## canivari

tlarkin said:


> I probably spoke out of place, but if you have multiple I/Os going on your hard disk greatly reduces it's performance.  Plus, you don't file transfer over TCP/IP if you are using windows you do it over SMB which has lots of overhead in itself, especially SMB 2 which was introduced in Vista.  TCP/IP is the protocol for networking, while SMB is the actual network application that runs on the TCP/IP Application layer of the OSI model to share files, authenticate, and other things like printers or other network devices that support SMB.  Back in the day SMB used to run over IPX networks, which was a considerably slower and inferior protocol to TCP/IP.
> 
> Every time you add a process to your computer that is reading or writing from the hard disk you are essentially cutting down on it's performance.  Sure SATA drives can transfer speeds up to 150MBs (that is bytes) per a second over the cable, but that does not mean that your hard drive will be able to output or input that to the disk from that speed.
> 
> When you get into large networking, like SANs and stuff like that that run over fiber disk I/O is the bottle neck.  Now, if you are doing a simple peer to peer network, and only doing 1 file transfer, well disk I/O will probably not come into play as much as I was implying.   However, having a faster hard disk, or say running an array (RAID) will increase data throughput.



Agree with you in your anwser.
By the way about the OSI Model is the 4 and 5 layers that use the kind of transport and network..


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## Calibretto

Well, like I said I'm getting around 10-11 MB/s, which sounds like it's pretty normal since I have a 100Mbps network. My hard drives are no where near the problem, since they get transfer speeds of 60-70 MB/s?


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## canivari

Calibretto said:


> Well, like I said I'm getting around 10-11 MB/s, which sounds like it's pretty normal since I have a 100Mbps network. My hard drives are no where near the problem, since they get transfer speeds of 60-70 MB/s?



I dont know the model of your NAS (dont know if he has a 1000mbps NIC) but if he does,you could upgrade your router to one with 1000mbps ports so you could have higher bandwitch from your NAS.
Dont need to upgrade your networks cables because theu allready can deal with 1000mbps (CAT5).
Hope that helps


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