Faster file transfer?

[RandomClown]

Hello,

Is it possible to buy fiber optic cables to replace my old Cat5 cables?

I want to transfer giga bytes of files quickly in the future.

I was reading on some sites that fiber optics are faster, stronger, & other good stuff about it.

I could not find much info on buying JUST the cable. I saw a lot of news, infos, & internet services.

Does it not exist in purchasable cable form?

[gcninja]

Hello,

Is it possible to buy fiber optic cables to replace my old Cat5 cables?

I want to transfer giga bytes of files quickly in the future.

I was reading on some sites that fiber optics are faster, stronger, & other good stuff about it.

I could not find much info on buying JUST the cable. I saw a lot of news, infos, & internet services.

Does it not exist in purchasable cable form?

I dont think so, I believe its only available for bigger companies and governments. And besides i dont think your current equipment can transfer that fast. its also hdd speed and your card.

ps

idk if you were joking or not just telling you what i know

[MRGRIM]

You can do it, but you're going to be spending mega bucks, I would hazard a guess of circa $1k just to network 2 pc's in some sort of cross over configuration

Can't you upgrade to Cat6 (investing in a Giga-backbone)

BTW: Fibreoptic breaks really easily... I ran 6 cores over a distance of 50 - 100m's (actually I let the end user do it as they where shirty) the cores where in a really thick armour casing, the managed to twist and bend all 6 cores (the cable alone cost £500)

So they had to buy another roll, which I ran the distance... only to have some money on their site run over the cable in a forklift... luckily it didn't penetrate all the way through the casing ;)

[VaKo]

A couple of 10GE nics and the cable needed will set you back way more than $1000, a 100Mb Fiber NIC will set you back £150ish, and a 1000Mb NIC near £500. Just go with gigabit ethernet and look at link teaming if more speed is needed.

[Sparda]

What kind of distances are you wanting to use?

I always thought networking over firewire was supposed to work at all? Test it with Firewire 400, if it works, step it up to 800.

[RandomClown]

To answer your questions,

Nope, I was not kidding.

http://www.fols.org/resources/faqDetail-2.cfm

http://www.fols.org/resources/faqDetail-16.cfm?ID=8

I could not find much info on what I wanted to know, so I did not know what form it came in.

I was hoping it could be bought just like ethernet cables.

[if the info was in plain sight, I am too tired to see it; been getting about 5 hours of sleep lately & I cant remember what I did a few min ago]

The distance is very short, I was only going hooking up 3 home computers [& a laptop some times].

==============

Just to make sure we all are thinking the same thing,

I was hoping to make file transfer between the home computers much faster; Not to get faster internet connection for web surfing/downloads.

I do not know much about all the internet hardware stuff, so I had no idea that fiber is nothing like ethernet cables.

I will just do Cat 6, unless someone knows of a better cable.

==============

Thank you all for the inputs.

[vector]

To answer your questions,

Nope, I was not kidding.

http://www.fols.org/resources/faqDetail-2.cfm

http://www.fols.org/resources/faqDetail-16.cfm?ID=8

I could not find much info on what I wanted to know, so I did not know what form it came in.

I was hoping it could be bought just like ethernet cables.

[if the info was in plain sight, I am too tired to see it; been getting about 5 hours of sleep lately & I cant remember what I did a few min ago]

The distance is very short, I was only going hooking up 3 home computers [& a laptop some times].

==============

Just to make sure we all are thinking the same thing,

I was hoping to make file transfer between the home computers much faster; Not to get faster internet connection for web surfing/downloads.

I do not know much about all the internet hardware stuff, so I had no idea that fiber is nothing like ethernet cables.

I will just do Cat 6, unless someone knows of a better cable.

==============

Thank you all for the inputs.

you need to check which type of NIC's or network interface cards you have already. if youre only using 10/100 cards in your computers then just buying cat6 cables wont do you any good, also you want to look at your router/switch and make sure its up to par, if you have upgraded all your computers with 10/100/1000 NICs but youre still hooked up to a 10/100 router on your LAN then that also will do you no good unless youre connecting computers directly to each other. you have to look at the weakest link in your setup and start there, even if you did get a nice multimode fiber setup for your home LAN it would exceed the read/write speed of your harddrives and probably even the bandwidth of whichever interface your were using. so yes the best cost/performance ratio for you would be cat6 and 10/100/1000 network cards for your setup. file transfer speeds are dependent on more than just the cable you use, you have to factor in the type of harddrive, the type of harddrive setup for example raid, the harddrive connection interface for example PATA, SATA, SATA II, 3g etc etc. you might have the ability to transfer huge amounts of data but if the rest of your setup isnt in line with that then you'll only be limited to whichever hardware is bottlenecking you.

[digip]

Just out of curiosity, and not to sound like a troll, but why the big screaming fonts?

[RandomClown]

digip: Just out of curiosity, and not to sound like a troll, but why the big screaming fonts?

----

oops, was my font too big?

I had my view setting on smaller..

=================

vector:

ohh crap thats a lot of stuff!

Well, to start from the weakest point,

1] Router: 10 & 100 [darn!!]

2] HDD Speeds: How do I find them out for future reference?

T~T

Thanks for warning me!

I still have no idea how to get the speed from the hard drive. Google did not help.

You said hook up 2 computers directly?

I Googled it, but how do I tell if any of my ethernet cables are cross over? without unhooking the network. [we have different brands; all the cables are different shades of blue/yellow]

Even if I have the products to pull that off, I still need to know my HDD speeds.

[vector]

digip: Just out of curiosity, and not to sound like a troll, but why the big screaming fonts?

----

oops, was my font too big?

I had my view setting on smaller..

=================

vector:

ohh crap thats a lot of stuff!

Well, to start from the weakest point,

1] Router: 10 & 100 [darn!!]

2] HDD Speeds: How do I find them out for future reference?

T~T

Thanks for warning me!

I still have no idea how to get the speed from the hard drive. Google did not help.

You said hook up 2 computers directly?

I Googled it, but how do I tell if any of my ethernet cables are cross over? without unhooking the network. [we have different brands; all the cables are different shades of blue/yellow]

Even if I have the products to pull that off, I still need to know my HDD speeds.

you dont need to know your hard drive speeds, i was just using that as an example of one of the factors that can impact file transfer rates. not to get off topic but theres many different factors that will also impact read/write performance of your hard drive. things like platter size, data density, rotational speed, raid configuration, etc etc. but i wouldnt worry about all that for now. just focus on one thing at a time. also you probably dont specifically need a crossover cable to directly connect one computer to another, most modern NIC's can automatically detect another computer connected with a straight-through cable and then automatically introduce the required crossover if needed.

[Tarbizkit]

dont forget about the os's that you are using to transfer the files to and from. for instance, vista and windows server 2008 have smb 2.0 support, which is a nice performance improvement over 1.0. in my labs i have seen about 40% speed increases. you will get the biggest benefit from smb 2.0 if the source and destinations are both 2.0 compliant. you would see just a little increase if only 1 of the 2 computers is smb compliant.

[haydent]

what kind of length can u get out of sata cables ;) maybe even u could hack a repeater ala usb style.

but in other news and why i came here was to recomend file copying alternatives to windows explorer as it really really sucks ass in XP,

Teracopy is ausome, u can pause it, resume it, queue ,it adjust buffers , see data rate, trottle it, shell integrate it...

http://www.codesector.com/teracopy.php

[RandomClown]

We have 2 vista & 2 XPs.

I looked up on Google about this SMB.

Did they not put it into XP?

either way, I think our XPs copy twice as fast, no idea why.

Darn, that means no improvements from cables upgrades at all.

TeraCopy seems useful, thanks.

I will check it out sometime.

[RandomClown]

While we are on the topic, my friend is into art/3D modeling type stuff in his college classes.

He wanted to know if there were any mega hard drives.

I showed him this picture:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/comm...FormFactors.jpg

There are mega large hard drives. :D

He wanted to know whats the fastest HDD he can get. Does anyone know a lot about good HDD specs / prices?

[VaKo]

15K SAS are the fastest, but a 300GB drive will cost about £500. RAIDing SSD's would also be fast.

[MRGRIM]

Quite a vauge HDD question.

I gathered you wanted an external HDD to transfer files to/from class?

Vako is correct with the 15K SAS in a Raid 0

[RandomClown]

mmm k.. There are a lot of words to learn; RAID, SAS, Grub, other stoofs.

But don't think your efforts were meaningless!

To be able to help my friend decide, I still need to know more about HDDs.

-------------------------------------------------------------

For example: [Link]

In the title it says "3Gb/s" but the description says "Up to 125-MB/s sustained transfer rate"

Is there something I should learn?

Me = no get it. :(

=========================================

PS: My friend had an 8GB HDD.

:D Definitely not good for video/3d modeling.

That HDD was uber slow!

He custom made a computer, so he bought a 1Tb for storage. Was not the fastest, but he was sick of the Low-Space warning.

Since he had no use for the 8GB, we [along with other friends] threw/kicked it around on the streets to see who could break it open 1st... ....nobody could.. O.o

We tried to pry it open & finally got inside it.

:P

[VaKo]

1 gigabit = 0.125 gigabyte

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgne...mp;locale=en-US

Basically these drives can peak at about 3Gbs/s but that requires a perfect setup and situation, in practice it averages out being able to push 125MB of data around fairly constantly.

For you, tell your mate to go by a WD Raptor 10K disk for his OS or just drives with lots of cache.

[PLuNK]

1Mb (Megabit) is qual in metric size to 0.125MB (Megabyte)

So a byte is 8 times as large as a bit.

RAID arrays some in many market standards, For speed RAID 0 is recommended.

With a minimum of 2 drives you can split the data among the two so the heads can write/read at the same time approximately doubling your data bandwidth.

With RAID 1 you mirror your data among a multiple of drives giving a higher chance against hard drive platter damage.

[RandomClown]

ok, so what would we use each speed for?

Are Bits for speeds & Bytes for size?

I also Wikied RAID, & learned about the other settings.

Holy crap, how do people design these things..?

I figured there would be like 2, the 0 & the 1.

"Next up, RAID 3000 RC735!"

"Turning 3 HDDs into 4!"

Thanks for the info, Knowledge is power!

[PLuNK]

Bits & bytes are forms of measuring data,

One bit is equal to either "1 or 0"

Pretty sure It's base 8 or base 9 values.

Might want to learn that basic concept before using your PC again.

[RandomClown]

Wait, whats base 8/9 values mean?

I dont understand the word Base.

Yes, I know there is a 0/1 in a bit. The [mega/giga]bit lost me.

I didnt know I had to divide.

[PLuNK]

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=differ...en+bit+and+byte

Hope that helps.

[RandomClown]

I meant I understood the bytes & bits.

I had to look up "what is base 8 9", but I came up with calculators "8<-->9" instead, & some weird forums.. Not even sure if they were related.

:D

Thats ok, I can survive with all I learned so far in this thread!

Thanks everyone for your inputs!