Hey everyone, I was bored today, so I started playing around with my network. Testing out some speeds and stuff on there. Now I have a Linksys E3000 router, and when it detects a Gb/s connection the LED turns green. (Compared to a 10/100Mbps connection when its blue).
Both my desktop and my laptop have Gbps ports on them, however when I was testing out the connection speeds by moving large 2GB+ files around the network it was considerably slower then 1Gbps or 125MB/s. It was around 60MB/s. Here is my question, both my devices are on CAT5e cables, will upgrading to CAT6 cables improve that performance? Does the extra protection against crosstalk in them really help that much? And if so, does anyone know of a site that sells them with free shipping. (Newegg's cables are overpiced, and Monoprice.com sells them cheap, but will kill you on shipping). Thanks, I have been wondering this for a while.

Cat6 does supposedly help with Gb networking, though I'm not really knowledgeable enough to say any more than that.

As far as where to look for free shipping on things, I always look at ebay. Any "top rated" seller based in the US is perfectly fine.
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=cat6&_in_kw=1&_ex_kw=&_sacat=See-All-Categories&_okw=cat6&_oexkw=&_adv=1&_udlo=&_udhi=&LH_BIN=1&_ftrt=901&_ftrv=1&_sabdlo=&_sabdhi=&_samilow=&_samihi=&LH_FS=1&_sadis=200&_fpos=Zip+code&_fsct=&LH_SALE_CURRENCY=0&_sop=12&_dmd=1&_ipg=50

I just buy a spool and wire the connectors. Depends on how much total length you're going to need if it's worth it. Looking at Newegg, it's amazing how overpriced it is. $230 for a 1000 foot spool of CAT6.

Hmm, I would need atleast 2 25FT cables. Possibly a third 50FT. I might have to take the high shipping on http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10232&cs_id=1023210&p_id=2316&seq=1&format=2#description Shipping per cable is about $5 to here.

You still must factor the storage medium you are reading from and writing to that may slow communication. Check the average read/write speeds on your hard drives.

Ah I forgot to mention, my mistake. Both of the "drives" were 2.5GB RAMdisks.

What are your network card link speeds? Good idea to make sure they're set up right. Incorrect link speeds can cause severe network performance issues.(This is assuming you're using a local network and not moving them to the internet and back again, in which case you'll be limited by your ISP)

Oh, and to check the link speed

Go to device manager, open your network card properties. There should be an advanced tab. Inside there is a list of properties. You're looking for link speed and duplex.

Both are set to 1Gbps. (On a side note, wow, having the output file in a video re-encode on a RAMdisk makes the process a lot quicker. Source on my SSD and output on the RAMdisk is so much faster. Doubles the FPS)