Abstract

Kingston Technology commissioned Tolly to evaluate the performance of their PCMCIA LAN adapter. 

This Tolly Group Technology Spotlight presents benchmark results for the Kingston Technology EtherX PCMCIA KNE-PCM, part of the firm’s 1994 Industry Benchmark for PCMCIA LAN performance. The report addresses a growing mobile-computing market in which notebook users needed practical LAN connectivity but had limited objective performance data for adapter selection. Tolly’s testing compared PCMCIA Ethernet and token-ring adapters against ISA-based baseline adapters, with Kingston’s EtherX evaluated in both Novell NetWare Open Data-link Interface (ODI) and IBM LAN Server Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) environments. 

The results show that Kingston’s PCMCIA adapter delivered performance close to desktop baseline levels, especially under NDIS. In the ODI test suite, using frame sizes of 64, 256, 512, 1,024, and 1,512 bytes, plus a 1,512-byte packet-burst test, the Kingston adapter came within 11.93% of the baseline at the maximum frame size with packet burst enabled. At the other tested frame sizes, performance was within roughly 26% to 37% of the baseline. In the NDIS suite, results were stronger: at the maximum 1,514-byte frame size with packet burst enabled, throughput was within 1.45% of the baseline, while at other frame sizes Kingston’s throughput was within approximately 12% to 16% of baseline performance. The charts on pages 1 and 2 summarize these Ethernet ODI and Ethernet NDIS throughput comparisons. 

Tolly tested the adapter in one-to-one client/server environments over 10Mbit/s Ethernet, using a Network General Expert Sniffer to capture traffic and a Hewlett-Packard Series J2300 Protocol Analyzer to verify frame sizes. The ODI suite used Novell NetWare 3.12 with Kingston’s ODI driver version PCMDM.COM 1.09, while the NDIS suite used IBM OS/2 LAN Server Advanced 3.0 with Kingston’s NDIS driver version PCMDD.DOS 1.7. The adapter supported the PCMCIA bus and 10Base-T or BNC media, depending on the supplied media filter. The page 3 diagram illustrates the notebook-based Ethernet test bed. 

Overall, the report concludes that the Kingston EtherX PCMCIA KNE-PCM offered notebook users Ethernet throughput that approached high-performance ISA adapter levels, making it a strong mobile-networking option for 1994 enterprise environments.