Does the length of cat6 cable make a difference in a home network?

I have a Dlink DIR-655 router for my wired and wireless router for my home network. I have a 100ft cat6 ethernet cable. I pulled it from the router to my home server in my basement.

Does the 100ft cable make a difference or does the fact that it's a cat6 cable make a difference?

When moving similar files at work, it's faster. So I'm trying to find out what's the bottleneck at home. What speeds should I expect for a home network?

The speed will be limited to the lowest of:

• Hard drive speed, compensated for seeking and caching
• Any part of your network between your locations, including switches, hubs, and network cards.
• In extreme cases, bus and cpu speeds of the connected devices.

Only in very rare cases would the cable quality or length be any real issue, in that case you would not observe reduced speed but increased lost/damaged data. (You could check that by continuously pinging your server while copying a large file from it.)

I suggest you first check that all your network components (computer, router and server) support Gigabit speeds (or whatever your think you should have). Secondly, I would suspect the router not actually offering the speeds it claims (seen that more than I should have). You could then connect a computer directly to the server to see if speeds increase.

Another likely possibility is low speeds on the wireless connection to you computer, likely due to poor reception.

100ft is not a problem for running 1Gbps over Cat-6, which should be able to be run over 100 meters. However, the likely culprit here is the NIC in your home server, and/or the DIR-655 itself, either of which may not be very fast. The SmallNetBuilder guys were only able to squeeze 250Mbps through the router; so the internal switch is at least that fast, but probably not much more.

Your work router is almost certainly far more powerful than your $50 DIR-655.