Are there any 1000 Base-T PCI cards for a PT Pro?

Title says it all. The built-in ethernet is kind of bottlenecking me....are there any that might work under 9 or 8....or not at all?

you're being bottlenecked by MacOS and not your card

but if you really wanna try, buy a Realtek RTL8169S and use the driver from here

finkmac said:

you're being bottlenecked by MacOS and not your card

but if you really wanna try, buy a Realtek RTL8169S and use the driver from here

Click to expand...

You think so? Transfers are a lot speedier for me on a QS G4 with 9.2 on it...

finkmac said:

you're being bottlenecked by MacOS and not your card

but if you really wanna try, buy a Realtek RTL8169S and use the driver from here

Click to expand...

I'm seeing only RTL8169SC models....would that work?

I use 8169's in all my PTP's and am happy with them... I'd have to look if they're sc variant or not, but they're cards i bought probably 15+ years ago....
sure they don't get the speeds of a g4, but that's not the point, they get good speeds on a fun machine in old versions of MacOS.

finkmac said:

you're being bottlenecked by MacOS and not your card

but if you really wanna try, buy a Realtek RTL8169S and use the driver from here

Click to expand...

The 1000baseT RealTek cards only work as 100baseT in OS9. But... Like you say, you can't saturate a 100baseT connection from something like a PowerTower. Built in SCSI is only 10MB/s (Vs 12.5MB/s for 100baseT ignoring reality and just converting bits into bytes) and there are are all sorts of other bottlenecks even if you use SATA PCI cards or whatever.

I assume the built in is 10baseT? If it is like a 9600 board. So they'll probably see a speed gain using 100 over 10.

Oh, and be warned, some manufacturers customised the manufacturer ID for their cards with that chipset. If they have, you have to modify the driver with some good old fashioned hex editing. It's easy enough to do.

Another thing you might consider is UniBrain FireNet. This lets you use FireWire for networking in Mac OS 9. It theoretically should be faster than 100baseT ethernet.

Phipli said:

The 1000baseT RealTek cards only work as 100baseT in OS9. But... Like you say, you can't saturate a 100baseT connection from something like a PowerTower. Built in SCSI is only 10MB/s (Vs 12.5MB/s for 100baseT ignoring reality and just converting bits into bytes) and there are are all sorts of other bottlenecks even if you use SATA PCI cards or whatever.

I assume the built in is 10baseT? If it is like a 9600 board. So they'll probably see a speed gain using 100 over 10.

Click to expand...

I thought it was 100 Base T, I'll double check. Also, I am running an ATA/166 PCI card w/ ATA to SD adapter, so im pushing a lot more than the onboard SCSI does.

Ok, guess I am sort of an idiot. It is just 10 Base-T....so I need a 100 Base-T card that will work.

Something like this should work:


I did some tests a while back and 100Mbps "Fast" Ethernet does make a difference.


These tests were from/to my Raspberry Pi 4 "retro home server" running MacIPRpi (1Gbps Ethernet) with both the PM 6500/275 and the Pi connected via an Apple Airport Extreme 6th Generation's Gigabit capable Ethernet ports. The software used was Newer Tech "Performance" v1.3 which is included in their EtherTech 1.5 installer.

The driver I used ("Apple Enet" extension, v2.4.2) for the "Apple Fast Ethernet 10/100BaseT Card" didn't work under Mac OS 7.6. For the "AsanteFast 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter Rev. B" I used this driver from Macintosh Garden.

The hard drives I used for the different OS tests were different which makes the tests not directly comparable but I was testing with what I had on hand and as much as it bothers me that I didn't take the time to get a disk configured with partitions for each OS and run the tests from there I think it does help illustrate the impact of drive performance on network data transfers.


My take aways:

Mac OS 7.6, and likely earlier versions, aren't really able to take advantage of 100Mbps Fast Ethernet. Not sure about 8/8.1 but by 8.5/8.6 it seems Apple made OS changes which allow the same hardware and driver (the Asante card/driver being the proof) to take advantage of 100Mbps Fast Ethernet.

In testing and real world you need to have source and destination disks able to sustain more than 10Mbps (1.25MBps) reads and writes to make use of 100Mbps Fast Ethernet. The "RAM to Server" tests may likely show some SD card storage bottlenecks on my Raspberry Pi server.

Phipli said:

Another thing you might consider is UniBrain FireNet. This lets you use FireWire for networking in Mac OS 9. It theoretically should be faster than 100baseT ethernet.

Click to expand...

Ooo, Firewire networking on OS 9 is actually a thing?

I thought that was only available in Mac OS X, and only fairly late versions at that (10.4 and up for sure have FW networking; not sure about 10.3 and earlier).

c

I purchased an Apple Fast Ethernet capped off eBay for $27…so we will see how this goes…