[Barman007]

Hi im trying to help out a friend but we cant figure out how to do this. He is sure he's seen some type of configuration that can utilize two NIC's at the same time for faster file transfer from his server. He has 10 PC's hooked up to his server which has about 7TB's of storage. Here is his post to me.......

hi i have got 2 lan card in my network as i am using file server on xp and i have two difeent switches on is lan 1GB and the other is 100 mps


i am wanting to setup both lan cards to run on the same network on two diffent swtiches


as thier is a lot of network traffic i added this second one so i can still keep the network running fast while thier is a lot file tranfering going on

Anyone have any ideas???

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All you would have to do is setup second NIC with a seperate IP address on the second switch. This will only give him another point of presence on the the network though and unless you are trying to keep services seperate, I highly doubt he will get faster file transfers out of this because it doesn't work that way. To effectively get better transfer rates as far as the network goes, you would need to get a gigabyte switch to go along with that gig NIC. Also, you would have to make sure that the computer that is receiving files has a gigabyte NIC also, otherwise you'll just be getting 100meg transfer speeds.

If this server is serving files out to the internet, you are limited by the speeds of the connection also.

You also have to remember that you are limited to the file transfer speeds of the hardware itself.

I hope this makes sense and helps and welcome to Geeks-To-Go.

[Gravity Gripp]

All you would have to do is setup second NIC with a seperate IP address on the second switch. This will only give him another point of presence on the the network though and unless you are trying to keep services seperate, I highly doubt he will get faster file transfers out of this because it doesn't work that way. To effectively get better transfer rates as far as the network goes, you would need to get a gigabyte switch to go along with that gig NIC. Also, you would have to make sure that the computer that is receiving files has a gigabyte NIC also, otherwise you'll just be getting 100meg transfer speeds.

If this server is serving files out to the internet, you are limited by the speeds of the connection also.

You also have to remember that you are limited to the file transfer speeds of the hardware itself.

I hope this makes sense and helps and welcome to Geeks-To-Go.

[Barman007]

Thnx for the welcome

I know a little about networking and was wondering how you said all the PC's would need BG NICs too. Cant you just have a GB NIC in the server, connected to a GB switch for the backbone of the LAN and the PC's will be ok with just MB NICs, because the bottleneck is happening with all the PC's trying to access the server? Or does having PC's using MB NICs slow the server and GB switch speed down too?

[Gravity Gripp]

I said all of the other PC's would need gig NICs also, only if your objective is to get higher transfer speeds. You are correct, there is nothing wrong with running a gig backbone, and you are correct that it would be a bottleneck in the sense that you couldn't go over 100Mb. The PC's with the 10/100 NICs would not slow the server down at all, you just couldn't get above 100MB transfer speeds.

[Barman007]

Thanx for your help Gravity, much appreciated.

Nice site too!!! Think i'll stick around here, I aspire to be a geek one day, nearly finished my I.T degree lol