1Gb NW card not exceeding 100Mb tranfer average

Hey there,

I have a bit of a problem that Ive been playing around with for a bit, I hope someone can help me out.

I have two servers with gigabit ethernet cards. I have noticed that when I transfer data between the two systems I am not exceeding an average tranfer rate of greater than 100Mbps.
When I transfer though and look in the Networking portion of the Task Manager I do see that occassionally my transfer rate will exceed 10% (greater than 100Mbps), but it will then drop below. I never have a steady rate higher than 100Mbps.

Now as I said the cards are gigbit and the connection between them shows the cable is gigbit capable (Cat5e). But the actual overall transfer is lower than the 100Mbps mark.

So far I have done the following:
-removed the switch between the two servers and placed them on a cross over cable (Cat5e) - this is after doing a lot of checking on the switch to verify it wasnt the issue
-Changed the speed rating on the two systems from negotiate to 1000Mbps

Now I havent tried a driver update, because I am concerned it will disrupt the traffic running on the servers' other nic which gives approx 100 users access to data. (This is not an issue though as average network utilization is around the 1%-4% range an should affect what I am doing on the other nic.

Both systems have Intel(R) Pro/1000 MT Nics.
Again any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Note I just realized the error of putting a crossover cable between two gigabit network card. Gigabit uses all pairs of the cable so a standard crossover cable isnt supposed to work. I will try putting a standard straight through in; as gigabit ports/nics are supposed to be intelligent with regards to this.

I'll be trying this out tomorrow.

 

Hello VIPER99, What is your source? To get a test of throughput, the source needs sustain a sufficient bit rate.

 

The source is a PowerEdge 1800 with 2 gigabit ethernet cards along with:
Intel Xeon 3.00GHz CPU
2.00 GB Ram
Server 2003

The connecting cable is a cat5e

Destination is PowerEdge 1850
Intel Xeon 2.80GHz CPU
2.00 GB Ram
Server 2003

The data being passed is an assortment of pdfs and autocad drawings equaling approx 1GB.

 

What about the hard disks?
Have you tested the max. throughput using the NTttcp tool from Microsoft?