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How do I test my LAN's ethernet bandwidth?

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Luminosity

Technical User
Oct 27, 2006
1
US
Do you guys know of any software or method to test the actual throughput of a gigabit ethernet network? I have two computers (mac and windows) that are connected via a Netgear gigabit switch. Both computers are set for full-duplex and the manual for my gigabit switch says it can handle 2000mbps at full-duplex per each connected device. Doing the math it doesn't seem I actually get 1000mbps per direction when transferring multi-gigabyte sized files. My plan is if the throughput is high enough I will do a home-brew version of Avid Unity or Apple Xsan which networks video in a post-production environment so multiple editors can be editing video coming from the same (massive) drive simultaneously. Right now I only have my project bins networked because they require much less bandwidth. "In theory" I should be fine with 1000mbps per direction because many popular video codecs run fine on drives with USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces. So if I can get 400mbps sustained speed from the network media drives going to each edit station it would be enough to handle DV25, DV50, HDV and DVCPRO-HD. With 1000mbps each direction I should be able to have 2 edit stations getting broadcast media across my LAN with speed to spare. Now ideally I would like to set it up for 3 edit stations. A 3rd one just for media ingest.
 
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