Gigabit networking & Tivo ???

[gNOMEintheRedHa]

I'm upgrading to a gigabit switch and I've got a few decisions to make regarding my Tivos.

I know I can keep them on 100Mb, but I'm going to have to re-hack them soon anyway due to the DST updates, so I was curious to know if there are any drivers available for any Gigabit USB dongles and if I would actually see any speed improvements.

2 HDVR2s
1 RCA series 2 DTivo
1 HD Tivo
1 Series 2 SA

[Jamie]

I'm upgrading to a gigabit switch and I've got a few decisions to make regarding my Tivos.

I know I can keep them on 100Mb, but I'm going to have to re-hack them soon anyway due to the DST updates, so I was curious to know if there are any drivers available for any Gigabit USB dongles and if I would actually see any speed improvements.

2 HDVR2s
1 RCA series 2 DTivo
1 HD Tivo
1 Series 2 SAThe backport drivers support the Airlink-101 AGIGAUSB and the Linksys usb1000.

You'll get some speed improvement if you can enable jumbo frames on your network. This means your switches and PC side NIC's need to be jumbo frame capable. With jumbo frames and gige, SAS2's see about 5-6MB/sec extraction performance (e.g. with mfs_ftp). Unfortunatley, hdtivo's don't seem to do as well, and performance reports for them appears to be mixed. Series 2.5's don't do as well either.

Without jumbo frames, there is no benefit to gigE on the TiVo.

[ten-seven]

USB is quite the bottleneck. Effective throughput is likely under 100Mbps, unless the USB port on your Tivo box is truly Fast 2.0, then it's about 480Mbps.

[Jamie]

USB is quite the bottleneck. Effective throughput is likely under 100Mbps, unless the USB port on your Tivo box is truly Fast 2.0, then it's about 480Mbps.Yes, the usb ports are "high speed" usb2.0 (480mbps). Still, the processor and architecture of the machine do tend to impose a speed limit around of around 100mbps. I've topped that occasionally in netperf tests, but not by a lot.