Lan Switch

S

Spike..

Gawd
Joined
Feb 16, 2006
Messages
666
I currently have a jumble of routers/hubs and switches for my various lans. i was looking for something to replace the tangle of cords i have going on. i rarely have more than 15 ppl at my lans, however many have dual gigabit connections, my main network bacbone is a 16 port dlink 10/100 switch. I checked the egg, and found this. Anyone have any feedback on this? any suggestions on something better in the same 130~ ish pricerange? all replies apprecieated, and thanked for in advance
 
Are your lans for gaming??? If so, you do not need gigabit.

Games are optimized to need very little bandwidth. All it basicly has to say is: Player X moves here, and fires this. What you DO need is at little latency as possible. So, you should have all players on one large switch. But you don't need gigabit. Save your money.

Gigbit might be marginally useful for transferring large files, but that is more work than play.
 
All that switch adds is eight 10/100 ports and two gigabit ports. And I'd limit people to one port per computer, absolutely no need to be using two NICs/ports per computer.
 
we do file sharing as well as gaming, i currently have a 500 gb nas, and am putting togeather a filesharing server. so while the main focus will be games it would be nice to be able to simouteneously transfer files. we prally only trade 300-400 gb the whole time (rough estimate) so nothing too major, but again would be nice to up it a bit... think id see a preformance hike from the 10/100 in that case? thanks again for the replies.
 
Gigabit will speed up your file transfers, if...

1) The sending and receiving computers both have gigabit-capable NICs
2) The sending and receiving computers are both on gigabit ports

That switch you linked only has two of such ports. That being said...

If you have two servers and put them on the gigabit ports, then theoretically (Without taking other factors in play), a server can serve 10 concurrent connections without a slow-up. While your client computers will not notice an increase in transfer speeds, it'll definitely require more to notice any bogging down. Know what I mean? And this is talking entirely from a file transfer point of mind.
 
And don't forget that gigabit speeds are only really available if you have the hard drives and bus speed to support it.

You'll lose something like 25% of that if your Gb NIC is on a 32-bit PCI bus, which I suspect is the case. And if you're only pulling off one or two hard drives, the drives will be your bottlenectk, especially if you have multiple tranfers that require reads of different parts of the disk. Ever move two large files/directories across a network (as in, two seperate commands)? It takes longer to run both simultaneously than to move one after the other.
 
For a cheap switch I would highly recommend that Trendnet one. I have two of them and they work very well.

QJ
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top