Hi,

I'm having some trouble with a couple of our PE2650, PE2550 and PE6650 servers and their Broadcom Gigabit adapters in that they don't seem to be connecting at 1Gbit to the network. The servers are a mixture of W2K and NT4 servers with their network drivers configured to Auto/Auto as specified by Broadcom/Dell instructions. Each server is connected to a Cisco Catalyst 6500 series switch and have their ports configured as 1000Mb connections.

The Broadcom Management application reports that each respective card is connected to the network at 1000/Full but we don't seem to be seeing any performance differences at all. The lights found on the NIC connectors don't provide any additional information which would distinguish it's connection from a 100Mb one, I've yet to find any Dell documentation which refers to them anyway.

I've also conducted a series of Robocopy data copy tests using a dummy 890Mb file which was used to transfer between different servers and workstations. The type of tests run were gigabit <> gigabit, gigabit <> 100Mbit, and 100Mbit <> 100Mbit but each reported similar results. Each test took about 4mins and 15secs to transfer the file between machines and reported an average transfer rate of 205 Mb/min regardless of what mixture of connections were used. I'd expect the gigabit connections to transfer the data alot quicker then what they did.

Any suggestions on what to look at next to try and fix this problem? I don't normally have much to do with our switches but can get someone else to look at the switches configuration if need be.