Gigabit Switch Question

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Vapor1000

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 8, 2004
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hey guys, im looking to upgrade the networking equipment for this office i work at, and im looking @ the 24 port Gigabit's, as we have about 15-18 computers to hook up to it periodicly...

all i need is 24 port (all 24 as gigabit capable), Unmanaged, Switch. but ive been reading up on Jumbo Packet Frames and how they can be a big performance factor in Gigabit Networks... but shoping @ Da Egg's site i didnt see any of theirt Switches that say anything about it anywhere... we are trying to keep the budget fairly low (i told my boss arround $120-180 for a switch before i realised that those were the dang 2x1000Mb port backplain switches) now that im not being decieved im thinking THIS D-Link is the way i wana go....

but can you all tell me if this switch supports Jumbo Packet Frames? and also give me a "what you think" about this switch?
 
The only cheap switch to support jumbo frames and 24 port is SMC 8524T. It's going to set you back closer to $400 though, unless prices have gone down a lot recently. Jumbo packets are nice, but you have to run them on your whole network, otherwise it will just slow everything down with fragmentation.
 
so do all Gigabit Nic's support Jumbo Packets?
or are there a few perticular ones i need to buy to make it work?

and also... forgeting the fact that the dlink dosent have Jumbo, what do you think of it otherwise?
 
Do you really need gigabit? I would wager that you don't, unless these machines do nothing but transfer huge files around all day. If these are just workstations, gigabit is a waste.
 
Fint said:
Do you really need gigabit? I would wager that you don't, unless these machines do nothing but transfer huge files around all day. If these are just workstations, gigabit is a waste.
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What ever happened to "It's better to have than to have-not?" :p
 
as i stated before... this program was very inefishently programmed & utilizes WAY too much network bandwidth
 
Vapor1000 said:
as i stated before... this program was very inefishently programmed & utilizes WAY too much network bandwidth
Click to expand...

I highly doubt you would still need a GigE LAN no matter how bad an app was programmed.
 
Why dont you humour us and give us a number on the network utilization.

Goto one of the workstations and hit cntrl-alt-del to bring up the task manager. bring up the networking pane. Then launch the utility or the program or whatever, and see how mich the 100mbit or 10mbit connection is utilized.
 
Try going to a lan party with 8 people, with all new computers. All of us shared one 10Mbs hub. The collision lights on the hub looked like one of those fancy neon signs that flash and have the dots that move around, like at the big casinos.

We all had a lot of crap to share. I had about 7 gigs of videos, some other people had family guy, another person had 6gb of MP3s, complete games, more music...

We got it done. took a long time. And lagged up the multiplayer games horribly.

What exactly do you need a 24 port gigabit switch for? I can understand if you are trying to move around a few months worth of music and 20 or so hours of Divx videos every day, but...
 
I wanted to add to this that if you are simply thinking about GigE just for future scalability then I dont really see anything wrong with that. But when it comes to price/functionality you really may want to stick with the 10/100 category switches.
 
1Gb/s really brings a computer down to a crawl. Sucks down the hard drive, and raises up the cpu usage fairly high also (well, on my computers it does to about %30 cpu usage).

You will have to have a high-end computer to make 1 gig ethernet worth your money. I can only get about 300Mb, sometimes 700Mb peak, on my new A64 computer with SATA hard drives. 10/100 Switches have holes in the back of them for 1Gbs ethernet "server" ports (some of the fancy name-brand ones). Maybe if you have a server, you should look for one of those.

10Mbs hardware is dirt cheap, when bought used. Almost the same goes for 100Mbs ethernet. 100Mbs ethernet is still, 12 Mega-Bytes /sec. Plenty damn fast, even for multiple streams of DVD-Quality video.
 
bob said:
1Gb/s really brings a computer down to a crawl. Sucks down the hard drive, and raises up the cpu usage fairly high also (well, on my computers it does to about %30 cpu usage).
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Something is wrong with your gigabit ethernet setup. Even without jumbo frames enabled it should not be bringing your system "down to a crawl" or use anywhere near that much CPU utilization. What gigabit nics are you using?
 
aug1516 said:
Something is wrong with your gigabit ethernet setup. Even without jumbo frames enabled it should not be bringing your system "down to a crawl" or use anywhere near that much CPU utilization. What gigabit nics are you using?
Click to expand...

This is probalby due to the limit of the PCI Bus. PCI is limited to around 140 MB / s. Gigabit full duplex is 250 MB / s. Using GigE on a typical PCI computer will saturate the PCI bus. If, as is most likely the case, it us used with the hard drive, then half of the PCI bus bandwidth will go toward hard drive and the other half toward PCI, so you might be able to get around 400 Megabits transferring to / from the hard drive before maxing out the PCI Bus.

PCI-E is perfect for Gigabit, 250MB/s for a PCI-E x1. PCI-X or the older 64-bit/66MHz PCI are probably the best interfaces for Gigabit cards as they will not become saturated by a streaming transfer at full speed.

Also is the application server / client or point to point? If it is server / client, most likely you will get a similar improvement in performance with a 24-port 100M switch / 2 Gig as with a 24-port Gig switch, as long as you put the server on one of the Gig ports. The server's Gig port will be the limiting factor (unless, of course, you use a high performance network card such as Intel Pro/1000 MT which can balance load across multiple interfaces, though you would need a Layer 2 switch for that)
 
I was not referring to a bandwidth limitation but rather the insanely high CPU utilization. I use gigabit at home without jumbo frames and I have never seen anywhere near 30% utilization doing simple file copies.
 
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