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If I have two nics in a Windows Xp box will it make any difference by "shot gunning" them? A friend of mine was talking about doing it and I was just curious if it would have an effect on speed.
Thanks,
Sounds like you're friend was talking lots of nonsence. Sure, you could have 2 nic's in one computer. But the only way you would see a speed increase is if each nic connected you t a different network. One of the networks may be faster than the other. But you cannot add the NIC's together to get double the speed.
If you're talking about bridging the connections, tat's basically doing the job of a hardware bridge. It just allows that machine to be a "bridge" for other computers to connect to the network.
Back in 1998 Diamond was selling modems with "ShotGun" technology that had 2x Rockwell K56Flex chips on the one ISA card, and used 2 phone lines to connect to an ISP, for up to 112Kbps transfer (at a fraction of the cost of ISDN). If one line had an incoming call, then the line was dropped, you answer the call, and then re-enable the line when finished (while the other line remains connected).
I remeber that. I actually have a modem from Diamond that will do that. It is a Supra Express, the best modem I've run into. But, you had to have an ISP that allowed you to connect twice simultaneously with one account or you had to have 2 accounts.
Couldn't have described it better myself. Also along the lined of connecting dissimilar networks, they also connect different types of networks, like different cabling.
Sounds like you're friend was talking lots of nonsence. Sure, you could have 2 nic's in one computer. But the only way you would see a speed increase is if each nic connected you t a different network. One of the networks may be faster than the other. But you cannot add the NIC's together to get double the speed.
If you're talking about bridging the connections, tat's basically doing the job of a hardware bridge. It just allows that machine to be a "bridge" for other computers to connect to the network.
Later
The new Intel Gigabit Server NICs support exactly what he's looking for. and they are even fault tolerant. you can yank out the network cable on one NIC while transferring a big file and the file transfer won't error out. it will take a few seconds for the entire transfer to fail over to the second NIC though.
Also the bandwidth you get from 2 NICs is not that much more than what you get from one gigabit NIC since no CPUs can fill a full duplex gigabit pipe yet. if the Server based 10/100 NICs supported this it might be fun..
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