> From: Drew Parsons [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > On Sat, Oct 30, 1999 at 11:28:07PM +0200, Michael Thaler wrote: > > Hello! > > > > I want to buy a pcmcia-ethernet-card for my notebook. I have a Sharp > > 9090 and I want to establish a little network with an old Pentium 75. > > > > First, is a 10 MBit/s card enough or should I buy a 100 MBit/s card? > > Are these cards much more expensive? > > 10 MBit/s is sure to be plenty. I don't think I've ever actually > even seen a > 100MBit/s network, though my card is capable of using one. Typically > I never get speeds over 1MBit/s anyway, so there's a lot of excess
Never get speeds over 1 megaBIT, or 1 megaBYTE? A 10 MBit network will give you at most 1,000 KiloBYTES/s. That's because there's 10 bits per byte when you send over the network. (10 Mbits/s / 10 bits/byte = 1 MByte/s) Most machines I've seen can get at least 400 Kbyte/s over a 10 Mbit network, which is still well above the 1MBit/s (100 KByte/s) you mentioned. > capability in a 10 MBit/s network. I guess you only really need to > think about a 100M network if you have a lot of machines on your > network and you're heavy stuff like video conferencing or large > data-bases. Most machines these days can easily keep up a 1 MByte/s transfer rate. If you can afford it, I would certainly recommend going the 100 Mbit (10 Mbyte/sec) route. It'll save a LOT of time if you routinely transfer large files. If you are just sending the occasional file or print job over the network, 10 MBit is probably good enough. > > Furthermore, are there any problems with these cards or do they > > generaly run with Linux? Are there any prefered cards? > > I have a Zircom combo pcmcia card (10/100 ethernet + 56K modem (+GSM, > ISDN...it's a cool card ;) ) which works great. But it's probably not > the cheapest you can find, and other brands can be fine too. Just > make sure there's a Linux driver for it first. In particular, > I'm not sure how > well-tested the Linux support for the cardbus cards is. I have tried a few "generic" 10 Mbit PCMCIA cards on my Debian laptop. I haven't had any problems with these cards, which probably all use the same hardware internally. By Generic, I mean those no-name sorts of cards like "Ovislink"... Good luck. Richard Glidden
