Best hardware for a fast local Ethernet?

Dear all,

I am setting up a new Ethernet network at home, I am going to have a good 100 Mbps internet connection (optic fiber) with a modem that have a gigabit ethernet card.
I would like to to measure the speed of data transmission between several servers that are going to be connected to the new modem (box) via some Ethernet cable, therefore one of my questions is:
What kind of software tool do you recommend to measure the performance of a local Network?
Does the cable can make a difference? Should I purchase a certain type of cable?
Thanks for any recommendations or pointing some quality documentation about optimizing the speed of a local network

Many thanks for your help and keep up the good work!

Unless your cables are really bad, or really long, I doubt they will be a problem.

The switches you use, the cards you use, and the boards you use are generally the bottlenecks, I find.

You can use iperf to test a network's bandwidth.

You probably should use cat6 or better cabling.