I got a little bored so I thought I would play with some fiber cable and my file server here at the house. I jumped on ebay and found a new 3com 3c985B-SX pci-x card and an Intel Netstructure 470T switch. Being new to this I bought a fiber cables at newegg which was 8.3/125 single mode, but with both ends being an SC connectors so I thought all was cool.
Using my desktop pcie card to the server on copper I was getting around 67MB/sec measured through Sandra. I changed out to the new 3com card, plugged in my cable. Again, my first time with fiber so when the lights came on I was thrilled. I ran my sandra test and it was only doing around 30MB/sec and I was getting a large amount of packet loss. I started reading through the manual which is 10+ years old, but I discovered what I thought my problem was. It said I need multimode fiber of either 50/125 or 62.5/125. I checked on the Intel gbic units and they showed the same spec, so I figured I was just using the wrong time of cable.
I ordered both the 50 and 62.5 from amazon (like $5 apiece!) and try them each out. Now it is showing like 5000KB/sec with both cables, which is way slower than before! I know the fiber cable is sensitive to bends etc. but are we talking about this type of speed drop? Intel has no support or documents for the switch on their website anymore, so I am not even sure how to log into it and see what all the settings are, though I don't even think that is a problem. I am not sure what the next step would be to troubleshoot this. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
Using my desktop pcie card to the server on copper I was getting around 67MB/sec measured through Sandra. I changed out to the new 3com card, plugged in my cable. Again, my first time with fiber so when the lights came on I was thrilled. I ran my sandra test and it was only doing around 30MB/sec and I was getting a large amount of packet loss. I started reading through the manual which is 10+ years old, but I discovered what I thought my problem was. It said I need multimode fiber of either 50/125 or 62.5/125. I checked on the Intel gbic units and they showed the same spec, so I figured I was just using the wrong time of cable.
I ordered both the 50 and 62.5 from amazon (like $5 apiece!) and try them each out. Now it is showing like 5000KB/sec with both cables, which is way slower than before! I know the fiber cable is sensitive to bends etc. but are we talking about this type of speed drop? Intel has no support or documents for the switch on their website anymore, so I am not even sure how to log into it and see what all the settings are, though I don't even think that is a problem. I am not sure what the next step would be to troubleshoot this. I am hoping someone can point me in the right direction.