getting better results from gb nic cards

mrblah

I have a small private network for backups and all 4 machines use Broadcom gigabit ethernet cards. 3 of the servers are Windows 2003 and one is linux. They all autoconnect at 1gb into a Netgear unmanaged switch.

Network utilization seems only be 15-20% on all four machines gb cards when they are backuping up to disk on one of the servers. The disk being written to is a 15000rpm scsi drive so I don't think it's disk bound.

Are there any recomended settings on the nic card to chnage that would open up the transfers more so that I could take full advantage of the gig network?

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www.invisiblespot.com

crdowner

One setting that may help is to set the speed and duplex of the NICs and the switch ports to 1000Mb Full Duplex. This will eliminate the need to auto negotiate.

There are several other considerations:
Are you backing up to a single SCSI drive? You should get better performance from a mirrored set or if you have the luxury use RAID 1+0.

Also, are you backing up multiple systems at one time? If so, the bottleneck may be the NIC on the backup server since all of the systems have to transmit through that NIC.

mrblah