[Thinkpad] GigE PC Cardbus adapter (Slightly OT)

[Stuart F. Biggar]

> My A31p has a 10/100m ethernet connection capability ... I need to 
> connect to a camera with GigE, and am on the hunt for an appropriate 
> PC-Card adapter.  I have been told that such adapters for GigE really 
> fall short of the mark, except those with the Intel chip-set.
> 
> Has anybody in this community experience in conjunction with their 
> ThinkPads?  I'd like to hear from you.
> 
> Frank K-F
> Brighton, MI USA

Frank,

Does the camera really need GigE on the computer?
Would plugging it into a GigE switch and your A31p
into the same switch work or is the camera data
rate too high for the 100 Mbit in the A31p?

We deal with large (multiple GB) imagery data sets.
Our servers have GigE and fast disk systems so they
can serve up data quickly.  I didn't like the waiting
for data to get to my notebook so I did some limited
experimenting with GigE with an older A21p which dual
booted Windows and Sun Solaris.

I have installed a server Intel GigE PCI board in
a dock for an A21p - it worked but the throughput
was not great (but better than with the 10/100 built
in Intel ethernet).  One problem is that the PCI slot
in the dock is 32-bit rather than 64-bit and slow.
You will probably have the same issues but maybe
magnified by additional layers of hardware and
software with Cardbus - I think that Cardbus is
limited to 32-bit.

It was several years ago that I experimented and I
don't remeber details but sooner or later the data
goes to disk and that will probably be the limiting
factor unless you have a raid box (multiple spindles
going at once) with a fast, low overhead interface
to it.  Transfer to/from RAM will work quickly for
a short while :-)  Notebook disks, even the modern
7200 RPM ones, are relatively slow compared to GigE.

The GigE in my T43p works reasonably well but I do
get better performance with Unix (Sun Solaris) than
I do with Windows XP.  Again the inbound limit is how
fast you can offload the data to the final destination
(RAM or disk or another ethernet or firewire or ???).

Stuart