How to achieve full Gigabit speed?

Gigabit Ethernet: Dude, Where's My Bandwidth?
www.tomshardware.co.uk/gigabit-ethernet-bandwidth,review-31611.html

...in real-world situations, the network will be severely bottlenecked by the hard drives.

Interesting comment(s):

amgsoft 22/06/2009 14:28
If you want to utilize the full bandwidth, you need to invest into hardware, which is able to handle it.

Anonymous 27/06/2009 05:31
If your switch supports it, you can send jumbo frames. You would also have to change the MTU and RWIN the corresponding workstations (if running windows).

From other sources:
Default Gigabit Ethernet has an impressive number of frames (about 81000 per second) possible and a high throughput for actual data (about 118 MB/s). By increasing the MTU to 9000 we could deliver even more data on the same bandwidth, up to 123 MB/s, thanks to the decreased amount of overhead due to a lower number of frames. Jumbo Frames could use the whole of 99% of Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth to carry our data.
source: Actual throughput on Gigabit Ethernet

Related:
Gigabit Wi-Fi: 802.11ac is here: Five things you need to know