How long does it take to send 100 GB over Gigabit Ethernet? Local LAN speed limits
13m 20s for 100 GB is Gigabit Ethernet's practical floor. It's the baseline against which 2.5 GbE (5m 20s) and 10 GbE (1m 20s) upgrades should be measured when planning a home or small-office network.
A 100 GB transfer over Gigabit Ethernet works out to 13 minutes 20 seconds at the full 1000 Mbps peak. That's the typical figure you'll see on a well-tuned home LAN. Modern NICs, a proper switch, and a fast disk at both ends. SMB and NFS add single-digit percentage overhead once the link is warm.
By TechCompare · Updated
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How this is calculated
Real-world Gigabit sustained throughput lands around 110-115 MB/s, which stretches the transfer to about 14-15 minutes. WiFi on a 5 GHz 80 MHz channel usually hits 40-70% of this in practice despite advertised speeds. For a home NAS to saturate Gigabit, both source and destination disks need to beat ~120 MB/s sustained, which any recent NAS-class drive does easily.
Verdict
100 GB at Gigabit Ethernet's 1000 Mbps peak works out to 13 minutes 20 seconds, the typical figure on a well-tuned home LAN with modern NICs, a proper switch, and a fast disk at both ends. SMB and NFS protocol overhead adds single-digit percentage to that figure once the link is warm, which is why the practical real-world time lands around 14-15 minutes rather than 13:20 exactly. The verdict's upgrade comparison is concrete: 2.5 GbE (2.5x the throughput) drops the same transfer to 5 minutes 20 seconds and 10 GbE (10x) drops it to 1 minute 20 seconds, which is the math anyone planning a home or small-office network upgrade should use to decide whether the per-port cost of faster NICs is worth the per-transfer time saved.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the real-world speed of a Gigabit Ethernet transfer?
Why does my Gigabit Ethernet transfer top out at 112 MB/s?
Is Cat6 required for Gigabit Ethernet?
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