will subnetting improve gigabit performance?

[ponythegringo]

hi there
i have a home network already set up as follows : Huwaei 556a wireless router connected to the outside world with various laptops and consoles connected wirelessly, the router's onboard switch is 100Mbps fast ethernet , a netgear GS605 gigabit switch is connected to the router and connected to the switch by cat 5E cable are a desktop pc with 2 onboard gigabit NIC's and also connected to the switch by cable is a homebuilt freenas computer with a gigabit NIC which i use to store files and download torrents at night .
So my question is will placing the desktop pc and the freenas box on a seperate subnet help to improve the file transfer between those two machines, the torrents can download at their leisure at night but i transfer the files to the desktop pc eventually so it is the file transfer speeds between the two machines that are important .

maybe i'm going a bit overboard...
Is the switch subnetting automatically?
has subnetting got anything to do with switches?

Perhaps there is a bottleneck i'm not considering and if so any ideas about where to look..

thanks in advance for any help.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

The switch doesn't really care what subnets you are using, it just relays information to the computer that requested the info, switches usually use the MAC address.

How long are your 5e runs? 5e can handle gigabit, but, not at the same distances as a regular 100mbps network.

If all your gigabit computers are hooked upto the gigabit switch, well, you are working at gigabit speeds, the switch is handling all the functions and isn't passing anything to the router, so changing the subnets wont help, the only time you will fool with your subnet masking is when you are changing how many computers you can have on your network.

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

With a switch, all you do is plug and play, it sends traffic by MAC address as c0rr0sive stated above. Subnetting has to do with IP addressing scheme's, and with an 'at home' setup, you won't have to worry about that.

While distance can play a factor, I doubt that a ran of Cat5e inside your home would be too long. I have my house wired with some runs that are long, and GigE works fine.

Before we start looking at answers, we need more specifics on the problem.

What is an example of the speeds you are seeing between the NAS and the PC?
Try this: unplug the cable between the switch and the router, so you have a small network consisting of the switch, the NAS, and the PC. Perform a file transfer, and note down what kinds of speeds you are seeing.

NOW, plug the switch back into the router, and with the Torrents OFF, try the same file transfer. The speeds SHOULD be similar. Then try again with the Torrents ON. You have to note that your connection speeds between PC & NAS will be (GigE - Torrent bandwidth).

Do you have anything else on the network connecting to the NAS? I stream movies/music/pictures between mine and my PS3, and computers.

Also, how many drives does the NAS have? Are the torrents downloading to Drive A while you copy files from Drive A to the PC? If this is the case, and if you have multiple drives, you might want to consider having torrents download to Drive A, then automatically be moved/coppied to Drive B when they complete. That could free up a little bandwidth.

 

[ponythegringo]

hi there and thank you for the replies
when corrosive said "the only time you will fool with your subnet masking is when you are changing how many computers you can have on your network." i had a bit of a eureka moment so thanks for that...
@ etheral dragon

i am getting between 15 and 22mb/s as reported by teracopy from the freenas to the pc and between 30 and 40 mb/s from pc to freenas

i stop all torrents when transferring files and i do have 2 drives on the freenas box 1 is a 240 gig ide with freenas os and data partition and the other is a 1.5 tb sata

just for the info the pc has the os on a wd raptor drive and the transfers occur to and from a 1tb sata drive on the pc used as storage.

i have already tried transfers with switch unplugged from router and speeds do not change.

freenas box is connected to switch and nothing else

and my cable runs are 7.5 metres exactly for both machines connected to the switch.
i understand mostly the differences between a router and a switch but right now i can't get my head around the maths of subnetting and this is confusing me.

i think the solution to my problem maybe to do with hard drive limitations or mtu size or packet size or something like that but i am only starting out with networking really and i am getting confused and hence the post on here looking for a bit of insight from someone who is network admin certified.
all posts i receive will help me understand more about networking so all posts are greatly appreciated , thank you kindly

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Sounds like hard drive limitations, or something else besides your network just can't keep up. Internally, on my computer with old platter drives, at most I ever see is 100mb/s, that's on SATA, PATA would be far less than half that.