Gigabit Question - Mixed Speeds

[Evil_Attorney]

Can't seem to find a reliable answer about this one, so turning to the expertise of you guys.

My Sage server has a gigabit NIC that is connected to a gigabit switch, which is also connected to a gigabit router. Sage records/stores everything on a gigabit NAS that is also connected to the same switch.

However, my Sage server changes channels on my Directv boxes via ethernet and are NOT gigabit.

While I am normally getting gigabit speeds (around 85MB/s) to my NAS, my question is, does my server take a momentary speed hit when sending data to the slower DTV boxes? In other words, can a single NIC send both gigabit and 100mbps simultaneously? I suspect that the answer is yes, but just want to confirm that I am not creating any temporary bottlenecks.

[wayner]

I am pretty sure that 1Gbps is the maximum allowed but that you can have dozens of connections between your PC and various TCP endpoints making up that 1Gbps. So I don't think your connection will be slowed or if it is it would only be by a tiny fraction while your PC is negotiating the connected to the DTV box via a telnet or direct connection of some sort and sending a few bytes to change the channel.

[KarylFStein]

You don't have to worry about slowing other traffic down. Traffic between your server and switch will be full speed. Now, there are ways that a channel could negotiate the rate of data packets being sent, but that still doesn't affect other connections.

[Fuzzy]

The amount of data being exchanged between your DTV boxes and your sagetv server over the 'slow' 100Mbps connection is almost nothing. Don't worry about it.

[Evil_Attorney]

Thanks. To be clear, I wasn't worried about the small amount of DTV data, just that the server NIC would "switch" into 100mbps mode for a short time, then switch back to gigabit mode. It sounds like that is not the case.

I've been having a stubborn problem where Sage will momentarily lose connection to the NAS, so I am trying to troubleshoot everything. :-)