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GigE switch traffic

M

Mobit

n00b
Joined
Mar 16, 2012
Messages
10
I've been doing some research on storage solutions and am hoping to get a straight answer on one very important aspect - the maximum overall throughput of a gigabit switch.

Is that gigabit shared throughout the unit, or can (theoretically) each individual drop be running at speeds that when combined go beyond 1Gbps? Going 10GigE is ridiculously expensive, even for our needs (4 ports).
 
It depends on the switch. They can either be blocking or non-blocking. The difference between the 2 is exactly as you described.

Non-blocking switches have a backplane that has more capacity than the sum of it's individual ports. Port speed on Non-blocking switches is not affected by the total traffic across the switch. You can connect 2 ports or every port on the switch, yet the per port speed will not degrade.

Blocking switches on the otherhand have a bandwidth cap that is less than the sum of the individual ports. So once you breech that limit, performance across all ports will be affected.
 
Any decent switch will usually detail its "backplane throughput" or similar. That is the maximum concurrent "bandwidth" across all ports.
 
Thanks to you both. That helps a lot in finding the right gear for the job.
 
A network switch as others have said will be rated in its backplane speed. If the box doesnt say what that is, stay away from it.

A true Gig/E switch will be capable of the following i.e.

8 Port 10/100/1000
Switching throughput of 16gbps, aka, 2gbps per port in full duplex operation. Anything less is a piece of shit switch.

It sounds like to me what you need is a simple dumb switch though that just works.Plug it in and go. No configuration necessary. Dlink $50.00 8 port network switch as they will work all day long with blocking anything. Just simple and effective. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817111039

Also stay away from Jumbo Frames unless you are running really high quality hardware as it tends to slow down more on a network. I would recommend not using Jumbo frames unless your testing leads to higher performance numbers.
 
Last edited:
Mobit said:
Is that gigabit shared throughout the unit, or can (theoretically) each individual drop be running at speeds that when combined go beyond 1Gbps? Going 10GigE is ridiculously expensive, even for our needs (4 ports).
Click to expand...

Also ...

You in no way need 10Gbps unless your storage side can read and write at that speed and that is really damn fast. The max speed you might ever get in a home based solution is 20gbps and that is only burst speeds using like 6 Crucial M4 SSD's in RAID 0.

If you want to study a little bit start researching how 802.3ad Link Aggregation works and what switches you need to get that and how to configure your network cards and what operating system used for storage will support that technology. Openfiler, FreeNAS, Windows Home server, etc... support 802.3ad but you need to have dual nics at minimum and you also need to know what VLAN'ing is. Great basic network education for you if you are a tech enthusiast.

Good luck!
 
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