Many years ago, I started using a 10/100MBit ethernet switch at home. At the time, gigabit switches were about 5-10x as expensive, and it didn't seem worth it. After all, spinning disks in ideal usage do about 100MBit, and I couldn't imagine that I'd end up wanting to go from RAM to RAM on two different machines.

Anyway. I've been copying SD cards from our trip to Utah from my laptop (which has a SD port) to my file server. iftop pointed to the reason the copies were taking a while - I was saturating my switch. Upgrading to gigabit was pretty cheap, so I did that. I suspect that this will double throughput, because the file server (which is a raid5 array of disks) is at about 55% io usage.

Anyway. I was just surprised that I've finally hit that bottleneck. And that waiting for prices to come down has paid off. Yey.

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