[Gllug] OT Firewire/Fast Networking

Matthew Thompson matt at actuality.co.uk
Mon Dec 9 23:14:19 UTC 2002


> No. Firewire gives 50KB/s, while modern IDE drives can handle 100MB/s 
> or
> more (in bursts, at least -- sustained numbers are likely to be a bit 
> lower).

Firewire is rated at 400Mbps however it is the Oxford 911 chipset that 
is used in most Firewire drives which will be the bottleneck here - 
this limits to around 40Mbps.

All the solutions to the problem are inadequate as the original poster 
mentioned iMacs - No gigabit ethernet on these as there's just not the 
expansion capability.

Firewire is limited to a hub arrangements and does not have the 
distances required for a classroom of 23 computers.

What is needed is some way of getting all the machines to copy the 
source files from the server - ideally a broadcast mechanism however 
you may find that using applescript provides an easy way to get them 
all copying at once.

I've just started looking at Applescript on OS X to automate creation 
and pulldown of a VPN tunnel using Kame and racoon and it seems quite 
powerful.

I'd be tempte to provide each workstation with local copies of the 
files required. If you do not have space to be able to do this then 
nothing short of a high speed RAID setup networked on the gigabit port 
of a switch is going to give you anywhere near the performance you'll 
need.

I've tried video editting across consumer networks and it's not fun.

M at t :o)


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