run full duplex with two NIC's?

[paulmofyourhand]

i ordered a shuttle sn45g,

and it has a built in 10/100 nic...

and im planinn to make it a file/game server,

and from my understanding, full duplex NIC's are able to upload and download at a constant full bandwith, somthing like that

can i add a 10/100 nic in the pci slot, and assign one to upload, and the other one to download?

or should i just buy a gigabit nic and buy a switch with a dedicated gigabit upload module?

useless info: 2700+/512ddr/9500 rpo/80gb WD/52x burner

 

[FLECOM]

no you cant have one upload and one download, dosent work that way

if you need speed get a cheap gige nic... its cheaper than getting the software to actually let you load-balance between two network cards anyway

 

[paulmofyourhand]

okey dokey, thanks

-paulm

 

[Snugglebear]

Full duplex allows a nic to transmit at the same time it's receiving. If you're transferring a single file from machine A to B, it won't speed anything up more than a few percent (as the ACKs can go out unmolested by incoming data). If you're transferring files back and forth from A to B and B to A, yeah, things can speed up a good 50-70%.

Anyway, what you can do in this situation is use multiple nics (or a multiport nic) and assign a given task to each one. Just take the IP of one nic and tell the machine to share files on that IP, then take the IP of the other and use that as the game daemon address. gigE would still be faster overally, but more expensive.