Non-Apple Ethernet cards (Re: Apple hardware)

[Tony Cooper]

In article <3371 at redstar.dcs.qmw.ac.uk>, liam at dcs.qmw.ac.uk (William
Roberts;) writes:
|> The 16K vs 64K issue is related to Apple's own cards (the old style
ones). I 
|> can't recall what I said at the time, except that the 64K card made a 
|> significant difference to the NFS benchmarks I ran, but the eventual facts 
|> 
|> >If the Tri-Data board compares well with the Asante on these three points
|> >then it's a good card. I won't swear to it but I think I found that FTP
|> >between a Mac IIfx and a Sun IPC ran at about 110KB/sec with the Asante.
|> >Assuming that the IPC is as fast as the Sun 3, the Tri-Data may have an
|> >edge over the Asante. (Then again, that may be a very poor assumption.)
|> 
I have an early ethernet card (1988 I don't know which rev) so I presume that
it is 16K. FTP between my MacII and a Sun IPC runs at 243K per second (a
half megabyte file copying mostly memory to memory). So this card is no
slouch.

The fastest I could ever do when at Stanford was about 70K per second. So I'd
say that the load on the network is far more important than the speed of the
card. Our network here has two suns, a Mac, and a few VAX/VMS machines all
sharing files left and right. The Vaxes put out a lot of DECNET crap
continually. So even our network is not quiet.

I'm sure Apple will support the 16K cards for quite a while. There is no
reason not to.

Cheers,
Tony Cooper
sramtrc at albert.dsir.govt.nz