Buying 16 Port Switch - Many features questions

[Deadlierchair]

Friends and I hold quite a few LAN parties, so we need a good switch. We had my 16 port Edimax which worked quite well for a long time, but now the uplink port does not work and it is having other problems, so we need to buy a new one. We do a lot of gaming (not a lot of bandwidth), but also a lot of file sharing and internet and other such network use, so we do want a switch. We do not want a managed switch, too expensive. Also, gigabit would be nice, but we will not spend that much, so a nice 10/100 switch is what we want. We'll order one from newegg for about 70 bucks, but there are like 5 models with different stuff.

1. What do the various protocols on switches mean, and do I want some more than others? IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3u, IEEE 802.3x, I see all of those and different on switches.

2. Is the MAC address table important? What does it do?

3. I assume more buffer memory is better, how much do I want and does it matter a lot?

4. Does the switching method matter? Most of them seem to be "store and forward" or "not specified"

We want 16 ports, and want to have an uplink port, but it's okay if it's a shared uplink. Again, if someone wants to point out a great switch, that would be excellent, keeping in mind we want to spend about 70 or 80 bucks.

Thanks a lot for reading, and thanks in advance for the help.

 

[Zardoz]

1. What do the various protocols on switches mean, and do I want some more than others? IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3u, IEEE 802.3x, I see all of those and different on switches.

802.1 Internetworking
802.1d Spanning Tree Protocol
802.1s Multiple Spanning Trees
802.1q VLAN Frame Tagging
802.2 Logical Link Control
802.3 Ethernet (CSMA/CD)
802.3u Fast Ethernet
802.3z Gigabit Ethernet
802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
802.4 Token Bus
802.5 Token Ring
802.6 Distrubuted Queue Dual Bus (MAN)
802.7 Broadband Technology
802.8 Fiber Optic Technology
802.9 Voice/Data Integration (IsoEnet)
802.10 LAN Security
802.11 Wireless Networking
802.11a 54 Meg Wireless Network
802.11b 11 Meg wireless Network
802.12 Demand Priority Access Lan (100BaseVG-AnyLan)
802.15 Wireless Personal Area Network
802.16 Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks
802.17 Resilient Packet Ring
802.18 LAN/MAN Standards Comittee

2. Is the MAC address table important? What does it do?

Layer 2 switch has several key functions, including Mac address learning, forwarding and filtering decisions, and so on. When a switch is powered on, the MAC address table is empty. When a device transmits and a frame is received on an interface, the switch caches the source address in the MAC address table. Then, the switch uses the table to both forward and filter frames received on the switch. It determines if frames are transmitted via a specified port, or not. So that, Mac address table is also called Mac filtering table or others related to "filtering".

3. I assume more buffer memory is better, how much do I want and does it matter a lot?

Buffer memory is a storage area dedicated to handling data while in transit. Buffers are used to receive/store sporadic deliveries of data bursts, usually received from faster devices, compensating for the variations in processing speed. Incoming information is stored until everything is received prior to sending data on. It is shared to the switch.

4. Does the switching method matter? Most of them seem to be "store and forward" or "not specified"

The most common switching method is a "store and forward" type. there are older methods and even some newer ones. but a "store and forward" will work fine.

We want 16 ports, and want to have an uplink port, but it's okay if it's a shared uplink. Again, if someone wants to point out a great switch, that would be excellent, keeping in mind we want to spend about 70 or 80 bucks.

Thanks a lot for reading, and thanks in advance for the help.

IF you ebay you can get some nice stuff for cheep, look for bay networks, 3com, cisco or others in you price range.

at new egg, there are some nice soho units from netgear, dlink, and linksys all in the 70 dollar range...

 

[Deadlierchair]

Any more advice about which would be a good unit?