I need to pick your brains fellow Bit-techers. I need the fastest 6port ethernet switch avaliable that isnt in the gigabit region (aka 10/100 only). Or are they all the same realy and i shouldnt be wasting my time and money on a 3com switch? any advice would be helpful as the network im building WILL have a LOT of traffic on it but as with all student projects its being done on the cheap. Many thanks
Get a 10/100, just make sure it supports full duplex transmisison. Aside from that, any knid of switch should work out the same, and have the same speeds.
Theres a few different things here, i have a generic D-Link 8 port switch (DES-1008D) which i used with an adsl router for a while back when i first got half meg adsl. Since then the switch has been at the centre of most of my small sized LAN gaming and performed admerably. On one occasion it was at the center of a larger LAN with 2 other 8 port switches either side and again, it performed very well, with all 8 ports in use for 3 days solid (with leeching and games) so overall it took a hammering Since then ive used the same switch in the middle of my network and indeed still am 4-5 years on and its still good. Recently ive been moving a lot of media files and folders around totaling 20-50GB at times. and when doing this the transfer speed has been between 8.5MB and 9.5MB/sec. Which is fine, but not fast enough for me doing that kind of file moving. Anyway, i was talking to my networking lecturer at uni and asking him about his gigE setup at home and started talking about the current transfer speed i get, which he was very surprised at. Apparently there is a general rule of thumb which states that the speed of an ethernet link will remain constant upto about 80% capacity (around 8MB/sec) then once there is more load put on the link, it'll drop down to about 20% regardless of how much you try and push it. So, 8.5-9.5MB isnt at all bad all things considered, however, i bought a 3Com SuperStacl2 3000 from ebay and at a recent lan, i achieved 11-12MB/sec across it which is blinding. So, while you can get very good, and importantly respectable speeds from generic 8 port switch, you can often get much better results from spending the same or less money on 2nd hand kit from ebay. My 3Com cost me £10+pnp (about £15-20 in total, i forget) for the rackmount unit, and while it is a bit louder than your average 8 porter, you DO get better performance. your average decent 8 porter will be about £30 once you've got delivery and such, maybe more. Theres loads of stuff on ebay going cheap so if you can, grab a 3Com of some description. all 3Com kit comes with a lifetime gaurentee (which is why its a little bit louder with a cpl of fans) 'course, you can 7V them and it'll be nice and quiet thus solving the problem, but invalidating the warentee. on the flip side, its only £20 and its damn fast sorry for rambling, but its late, and ive been at work all day, btw LAGMonkey, werent you at the bit-meet or is my memory failing me more than normal?
I dont know how much your budget is, but 8 port Gigabit 1000/100/10 switches can be had for very little money these days. Have a look here. If you are transferring largeish files across the network you will notice a huge difference with gigabit speeds.
I used to have an old gineric 10/100 switch and i had BIG problems with that. Basically the network will get a hammering 90% of the time once its up and running (video, games,file transfers etc) so i wanted a switch which could cope. Ive been eyeing up some superstack 3s on Ebay but if you say the 2s are good then ill check them out. Ive got a while yet before i have to break out the cable box but im just getting ready for it. Majormonkey, i would love GigaE but unfortunatly there are are a few laptops on the network so they wont see any benifit in the official sence of the word. Although if i were to have a GigaE switch would that improve the transfers for the 100meg NICs? Phatt i was indeed at the Bit-tech meet so your brain still works EDIT:: ive just spotted some cisco catalyst switches and for £30 for a 3500XL im realy tending towards that. Good idea or not?
If you have 2 or more machines on the network with gigabit nics, then I would go for a gigabit switch. Machines with 100Mbit nics would not see any benifit.
Yea, thats the problem, none of the machienes will have GigaE cards in them. Many are laptops and there isnt a point in upgrading them to that. I was just thinking that the GigaE swtiches will have a higher backbone connection within them allowing for a higher overhead when the switch gets hammered with lots of streaming media/file leeching.
I would go with the Cisco switches, I have had tons of good luck with them, you can tell that they put their time in the Cisco products and not enough in the Linksys Home Consumer Products.
Although your 10/100 NICs wouldn't see an improvement on a GB switch, if you ever got a GB NIC then more 10/100 NICs will be able to talk to that GB NIC at once. As others have said if you are getting to the point where the consumer level switches aren't cutting the mustard then get a cheap enterprise switch off ebay. With a good layer 2/3 Cisco or 3Com (or even the better Netgears - the Netgear Smart switches are great), you could start playing with features like Trunking (allows you combine multiple ports into a single fat pipe - often used to create a large uplink between switches), VLANs (will allow you to create collision domains if you have lots of machines; to stop for example broadcast packets from hitting every port), and QOS (to give higher priority to certain ports, etc) and other such fun.
looks like thats all sorted then, im certainly going to get me a cheap enterprise switch off ebay. I already play about with QoS and the trunking sounds right up my street (oooo sounds a bit dirty dosent it ) Ta for the advice and ill let you know what i end up getting although that wont be till after Xmas as funds a bit tight.
