Apart from the normal advancements in technology the change to wirelessN was to help those with big fat broadband pipes to maintain download speeds. A normal WirelessG network rarely keeps up at 54mbps unless your sat on top of the router and that's just plain silly.
Anyway back to gigabit networks. Gigabit is as it's name implies, 1000bits/s. We've had 100 base networks for longer than I can remember and they work upto their limits. Gigabit motherboards have been around for a couple of years so should we be looking at or investing in a gigabit switch?
Here's something to help you answer that.
So what is a gigabit? It is 1,000 megabits, not 1,000 megabytes. There are eight bits in a single byte, so let’s do the math: 1,000,000,000 bits divided by 8 bits = 125,000,000 bytes. There are about a million bytes in a megabyte, therefore a gigabit network should be capable of delivering a theoretical maximum transfer of about 125 MB/s.
While 125 MB/s might not sound as impressive as the word gigabit, think about it: a network running at this speed should be able to theoretically transfer a gigabyte of data in a mere eight seconds. A 10 GB archive could be transferred in only a minute and 20 seconds. This speed is incredible, and if you need a reference point, just recall how long it took the last time you moved a gigabyte of data back before USB keys were as fast as they are today.
Armed with this expectation, I’ll move a file over my gigabit network and check the speed to see how close it comes to 125 MB/s. We’re not using a network of wonder machines here, but we have a real-world home network with some older but decent technology.
Read the full article hereNext, let’s consider the hard drives. Even the older IDE interface sporting the ATA/133 specification should be able to support a theoretical 133 MB/s of data transfer, and the newer SATA specification should be able to breeze by the requirements, providing at least 1.5 Gb/s of bandwidth. But while the cables and controllers might be able to handle the data, the hard drives themselves might not.
Consider that a typical, modern 500 GB drive will likely be able to sustain data transfer rates somewhere in the neighborhood of ~65 MB/s. While it might burst faster at the start of the drive, it will slow down throughout the transfer. The data located at the end of the drive will read even slower, perhaps in the neighborhood of ~45 MB/s.
We have gigabit at work and whilst it helps in transferring large chunks of data we don't see anything near gigabit. As the article shows the performance boost between 100 and 1000 base networks is approx 200-300% ie 200 - 300 bits/s
