kcnychief

OK - wow!

While you guys are all probably right to an extent, all I have done so far is the cabling and the NAS devices. New PC with Gigabit card and router are not here yet.

That being said, I used to get a paultry 1-2.5 MB/s when transferring and now am getting almost 9MB/s!!! I realize it was probably the low grade hardware I had before, but that is more than I could have ever hoped for!

Here's to thinking the rest of my stuff will help more

X-Istence

The Cat 6/Cat 5e thing is a lie. In the house I live in we have over 600 feet of Cat 5e and all of it is interconnected with Gigbit switches. we can max it out without a single problem.

No-one can say they notice the difference between a Cat 5e cable and Cat 6. The reason for this is the fact that there is not enough interference in your house to cause any problems. Cat 6 was created to reduce cross talk, and has more twists per inch in the cable.

The only time you will start to see a difference is when working with large bundles of cable. For example in a corporation where hundreds of workstations all terminate in the wiring closet. At that point there are so many wires so close together it becomes hard to stop cross talk, which is why shielded wire was invented. While a tad more expensive it stops crosstalk.

Cat 6 right now is pushed on consumers are places like Best Buy so that they can sell sell sell. There is no real advantage. Especially if runs are shorter than 100 meters there is no difference. Take a Cat 5 cable, do tests, then plug in a Cat 6 cable and do tests. There will be no difference.

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Dark Atheist

my brother is a data cabler (installs switches phones etc. in large offices - server rooms) and he did tell me what the overall and main difference between the two were, but i have forgot was something about being able to run more off of of the cat6 than the cat 5e, can run more off the 4 pairs or something.

I will have to ring him tomorrow and ask, i use cat6 as that was the cable he had on the van at the time, and seeing as it was free i didn't complain about what cat it was

kcnychief

Well I have seen about a 400% increase in data transfer, but most likely because I am using higher quality NAS devices and gigabit switches as well as a gigabit NIC in my PC. All and all, much better (thank god)

Dark Atheist

only other diff between cat5 and cat6 is the frequency it uses - cat5 = 350mhz cat 6 = 500mhz