Should I upgrade to a gigabit switch, 10/100, or just use my hub

T

Tunabow

[H]ard|Gawd
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In my home I have a small network for me and my brothers computer. I frequently have people over for lans and stuff and was wondering if I could get a big performance improvement by switching to a 10/100 switch or 10/100/1000 switch.

Heres how my network works
DSL modem is connected to my Netgear wireless router
Wireless netgear is connected to a 3com Linkbuilder FMSII 10mb 12 port hub
all computers are connected to the hub

The main use of the network is internet and gaming. there isnt too much file swapping going on but it does happen sometimes. All my files are stored on a fileserver. I mainly play my mp3's and movies off the file server to minimize the amount of stuff I have on my own computer.

Would it be worth it to get a 10/100 or 10/100/1000 switch or just use my hub?
 
Tunabow said:
Would it be worth it to get a 10/100 or 10/100/1000 switch or just use my hub?
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From a hub to a switch you should see a small improvement (there are actually a lot fo small improvements). Moving to 10/100/1000 I doubt you'd see any actual improvement over the 10/100 switch.
 
all machines (or most) would have to have gbE nics to see an improvement with gbe, but I would deffinitly go with a 10/100 switch
 
most of my friends that come over have gigabit, what im looking at getting is a netgear 5 port gigabit switch. I can buy my server/brothers pc a gigabit nic and then the entire network would be gigabit
 
Tunabow said:
most of my friends that come over have gigabit, what im looking at getting is a netgear 5 port gigabit switch. I can buy my server/brothers pc a gigabit nic and then the entire network would be gigabit
Click to expand...

Get the 8 port Gigabit switch from Dell. It's only $95 right now and if you look you can sometimes get it for $50 after MIR.
 
If you get the dell switch, be sure to check all the ports. Had to rma one myself, which took them about 1.5months to rma (backordered) and required paying for the 2nd one then get credited back once they get the switch. 2nd one came good. Nice rack mountable too. I have mine in a Compaq rack :D
 
Just upgrade mine to GigaLan. 700 MB usually takes 2 mins over the 100 switch, now takes 20 sec. Now that's one new tech actually works!
 
I have both the netgear and the Dell switch mentioned. They both work well. I'll be picking up another one of those soon, just not sure which.

If you look around you can get the netgear for $70

But if you find that Dell for $50 get that
 
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