I recently bought a WD mycloud 2tb NAS drive and came to the conclusion that i need to update my ...

[G+_Nico Laurez]

I recently bought a WD mycloud 2tb NAS drive and came to the conclusion that i need to update my network cables and switches to get the most out of it. the modem-router that is provided by my carrier is gygabit supported while the internal cable is still cat5. will i have a serious boost in performance by changing the cable and switch? Also, what is the best tool to measure the transfer speeds on windows? I'm looking for something like the black magic utility for OSX.

 

By the way, really looking forward to seeing bryan's cartoony face on the knowhow design! :D

 

Kind regards,

Nico

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

You can most likely just replace the network switch and get gigabit speed without replacing all the cat5 cables as well.  If you have a very long run or a network cable run to close to  power mains you may not get gigabit out of those, but generally gigabit will work on cat5.  The only structured wiring I put in place at work is a 200' run to another building where I used cat7 just because the price for the cables were about the same as cat6.  Everything else is old enough that it's cat5 and runs at gigabit speeds without issue.

[G+_Ben Reese]

It depends...

Is it currently CAT-5 or CAT-5e? CAT-5e you probably wouldn't see any improvement, but CAT-5 you might. Unless it's really old cable, it's probably 5e.

How long are your CAT-5 runs? Just patch cables and short runs? Think of it like the longer the cable the more likely it is to pick up interference.

And of course, what's connecting to the other end of the cable? If the other device doesn't support or need Gigabit, you wouldn't likely get any gain out of the cable upgrade even if it did improve capable speed.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

Cat5 does not support 1Gb connections. You have to have at least cat5e to support 1Gb over copper.

 

If your not sure, check which you have. Look at the casing very closely. If to has any writing on it, it should tell you if it is cat5 versus cat5e. If that doesn't help, check the rj45 heads. If they are only using 2 of 4 twisted pair, it is cat5. If all 4 twisted pairs are used, it is cat5e.

[G+_Ben Reese]

That 2 vs 4 pair doesn't always hold true, but still a good thing to check. To the best if my knowledge, Gigabit still requires 4 pairs while 100 Mbps is fine with 2 pairs.

 

Basically, it's 10/100 networks could be Base-TX (2 pair) or Base-T4 (4 pair). Base-T is the overall category, but I believe traditionally it has implied T4 - until Base-TX became the overwhelming standard. It's now assumed (and expected) that 100 Mbps network devices are TX and 1000 Mbps network devices are T4.

Of course, there's more exciting reading on Wikipedia and spread all over the Interwebs:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Ethernet