Cat 5e or Cat 6?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 04, 2009 1:28 AM EDT |
I'm getting ready to wire up a new network. I probably don't need gigabit speed today, but I don't want to totally close the door on that. Will Cat 5e cable be good enough? Has anybody seen any real-world advantages using Cat 6? |
| Scott_Ruecker Feb 04, 2009 1:37 AM EDT |
I would check with Sander to b sure but in my experience the money spent on cat6 just doesn't seem worth it. |
| techiem2 Feb 04, 2009 3:42 AM EDT |
I believe we use cat5e when we wire stuff at the college where I work. I seem to recall someone telling me that cat6 is more painful to put ends on as well. |
| Sander_Marechal Feb 04, 2009 5:28 AM EDT |
Cat 5e should work, but Cat 6 will give you a better signal. As an added bonus it gives you 10 Gigabit ethernet as well, but it will be some time before you have devices that support this, so that's purely for the geek points :-) Personally I would go for Cat 6 if you don't care about the price difference, but there are a few reasons you way want to go with Cat 5e anyway: * Techiem2 is right that Cat 6 is harder to terminate, so if you cannot use pre-terminated cables (because you have to run them inside/through walls) then Cat 5e may be easier to work with. * Cat 6 is also a lot stiffer than Cat 5e so that's another reason why it can be harder to use if you have to run them inside walls or around sharp corners. At home I have replaced everything with Cat 6 about a year ago. I could get by with only standard lengths (a couple of 20 meter cables and one 5 meter cable) and I only needed to crimp one terminator on a cable that runs through a wall to my "server room" (i.e. a modified cupboard). I had cable gutters to run the rest of the cable through so that way quite easy. I bought a nice 8-port Netgear Gigabit switch that Carla recommended to me to complete the picture. Gigabit can come in quite handy. I have my all my PCs set up to rsync /etc and /home to my server when they shut down or reboot. With 100 Mbit it could take up to half an hour. Now with Gigabit it takes just a few minutes (the bottleneck is now the write speed of my server's RAID setup). |
| SamShazaam Feb 04, 2009 10:00 AM EDT |
I agree with Sander. Even of the additional bandwidth is not used directly it will limit the number of CRC errors which cause retransmission of data. Networks are almost never the sort of pristine environment that standards specify. The better signal will help the throughput of data.. Cat 6a is starting to come into practice. Over the next time period CAT 5e will start to become more difficult to support. CAT 5e may be cheaper as vendors try to exhaust their inventories of equipment which they will soon be unable to sell. Cat 6 will give a longer service life. The increased cost will be there but should not be unbearable. |
| jdixon Feb 04, 2009 12:03 PM EDT |
> Will Cat 5e cable be good enough? Good enough? Probably. It depends on the length of your cable runs. But if you really want good Gigabit performance and possibly higher in the future, you should run Cat 6. Of course, our home network is still 10 Mbit. :( |
| Steven_Rosenber Feb 04, 2009 7:19 PM EDT |
Question: Can you use the same crimp tools for Cat 5e and Cat 6? I'll probably spring for the Cat 6. I'll be doing lots of rsync, too, and while all the clients won't be 1G (or even 100M -- I've got my Sparc 20), I'll have a couple of 1G boxes (including the old G4 running Debian) on the network. |
| Sander_Marechal Feb 04, 2009 9:49 PM EDT |
Quoting:Can you use the same crimp tools for Cat 5e and Cat 6? Yes, unless you have one of those cheap plastic ones that you get for free with your ADSL kit. They tend to be too bendable/breakable because Cat6 is tougher. Quoting:I'll probably spring for the Cat 6. I'll be doing lots of rsync, too, and while all the clients won't be 1G , I'll have a couple of 1G boxes on the network. Don't forget you need a Gigabit switch as well then! I bought this one after Carla recommended it to me: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122... |
| techiem2 Feb 04, 2009 10:12 PM EDT |
I bought the same switch as well to replace my central switch. I have a little cheap dlink gigabit switch in my room for extra connections. I think I bought cat6 cables to upgrade a few runs when I got the new switches in. The rest of the lines are cat5e as I recall. Of course, currently there's only 3 machines actually using gigabit: the fileserver, the network server, and my desktop. My laptop can too, but it's usually on wireless. I'd need to upgrade a few more switches to gigabit and upgrade the NICs in a couple more comps to get the whole lan gigabit. But the other comps don't do much, so it doesn't matter. :) |
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