After years of messing with different home networking setups (and some small client installations) I would recommend Netgear - they seem to be pretty robust and sensible, in a 'you know what you're getting' kind of way - drivers work as expected etc. They are nothing special, and as stated above 3com/Intel probably have the best cards but for a small/home office setup I'd go with Netgear every time.

One of the good thinks about Netgear, compared to other cheap kit is the boxes. I far prefer a decent metal case on my hubs to a cheap and tacky plastic one. The metal Netgear cases just feel so much better made.

And they're such a great shade of blue, too .

Yes, nearly as nice a shade of blue as the link light on the back of the Mk2, which is nearly as nice as the signal indicator on my Geodesy (http://www.morpheous.com/)...

Well, it seems that we got a little off topic here, but hey, so what.
I've been using Ethernet to send music to the player.
I did three trials to benchmark the "uploading tunes" portion of syncronization.

The average of the three was 24.6 Megabytes per minute.
- Call it 25 Megabytes per minute
I know this is not the standard unit for transfer rates,
but I feel it is a more useful benchmark number.
If you have 100 Megabytes of stuff to put on the player,
it'll take 4 minutes (or so)

This benchmark does not include time for
reading / deleteing / rebuilding database, etc,
as those times will vary depending on database size,
ammount of data on the unit, disk size, etc.

I haven't gotten around to benchmarking my USB connection,
but I suspect that they will be significantly slower.

That sounds quite slow. For me, emptool reports between 700Kbytes/sec and 1Mbyte/sec (occasionally, late at night when the Ethernet switch is otherwise idle). That's 40-60 MB/s in your units.

For me, emptool reports between 700Kbytes/sec and 1Mbyte/sec (occasionally, late at night when the Ethernet switch is otherwise idle).

Same here. And if anyone can figure out why it varies so wildly (from 700-950Kbytes/sec) from one tune to the next, I'd be very interested. Especially if it led to a technique for always getting the 950 value.

Using tar and netcat to hose a lot of fids onto a car player gave me 700Kbytes/sec on average. It's thus possible that the 950 value was due to buffers filling that had drained slightly between songs, and doesn't represent a sustainable rate.

Peter

When I'm uploading, I can hear whether or not it's a fast one. I get noise from my display card appearing on my (on-mobo) mixer, too quiet to hear when I'm playing the empeg through it, but I can just detect the percentage meter changing. Maximum throughput occurs when a track is long enough that the per-track overhead is small, but not so long that transfer is stalled when it gets ahead of disk access. I'm assuming that's what we're waiting for; half a second or so at a time. I assuming it's the writing on the empeg that's the issue, rather than reading (I'm reading from a local Reiser FS). Of course, normal network traffic is also an issue, as I hinted in my earlier post.

700 Kbits per secons, eh ?

I was using a crossover cable for my trials, so Network traffic is not a variable, must be something in windows, or with my network card / driver,
I'm using win98 SE with a Linksys EtherFast 10/100 Card

Anyone have tips for tweaks I might make?
(other than using linux)

Anyone have tips for tweaks I might make?

I don't think you've mentioned which version of the player software you're running. My 700Kbytes/sec, and I suspect tms13's too, were on public betas of the forthcoming v2.0 of the player software. The current recommended version, 1.03, is slower than the 2.0 betas.

Peter

Sorry,

I have a 60 Gig Rio running 2.00 beta 11 and I used the Logo editor to apply v200.hijack.v200b11.mk2.zImage

In reply to:

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My 700Kbytes/sec, and I suspect tms13's too, were on public betas of the forthcoming v2.0 of the player software.

---

Yes, I'm tracking the beta releases. On the host side, I'm not tracking quite as keenly: Linux 2.4.9-ac9.

Figured I'd bring this back up....

I've been doing some testing, actually some timing.
There are like 10 ways to connect to the Empeg these days,
with all kinds of great software,
But the question remains : What's the Fastest ???
This thread has lead me to belive that Ethernet is fastest,
coming in around 700 - 900 KiloBytes/second.

The only way I was ever able to get that speed was using straight FTP.
When I use Emplode to upload songs I only get around 300 - 400 KiloBytes/second and
When I use Jemplode to upload songs I only get around 450 - 550 KiloBytes/second.

The only good way I've been able to calculate this is to record the size of the data I'm uploading, then pay attention to the synchronization routine and start my stopwatch when songs strat uploading and stop it when they stop.

I know It's not a hardware issue, because I can get 700 - 900 KiloBytes/second over FTP.

Now if the syncronization can't do the FTP speed, I say why not ?
Why can't I get the 700 - 900 KiloBytes/second I get on FTP ?

like to know if anyone has used Emplode or Jemplode to upload data at a rate greater than 600 KiloBytes/second ?

Hey, if you don't want to time all your uploads and calculate the speeds, goto http://www.dumeter.com/ and download thier software, i've been using it for about 3 years now. Works very well!

Remember that the empeg only has an ISA bus, not much RAM, and doesn't have a huge amount of speed optimization in its circuitry. They were more concerned with making it reliable and durable than blazingly fast. It's possible you may have reached the limit of what it can do realistically.

Why the fascination with raw upload speed? For any given player, you'd only need to do a huge upload a few times during its lifespan.

You should be able to get that level of speed, emplode will use "fast channel" (instead of the normal blocked protocol) over ethernet, opening a separate tcp pipe and just dumping the file down it. If the fast channel fails though, it'll go back to the slow method.

Hugo

Tony you need a bigger drive!

I agree for the most part however - it is the database rebuild that really takes forever...

Yes but this ISA bus and low RAM machine IS capable of 900 KB/s over FTP,
It's just dissapointing to know that uploading during synchro is about half the speeed of achievable FTP speed.
I'm sure everyone here would love to double their upload speed during synchro.