Stupid question of the day

[Crosshairs]

First, its OK to make fun of me, as long as you can answer my stupid question...

so, I have my router hooked up to an 8 port switch, but now I find myself 1 port short...so that being said, since I have 4 ports on the back of the router and I'm only using 1 to feed the switch, can I still use the others ?
FWIW, I do have a 24 port switch I could use but i prefer the 8 port because its quiet...both are Dell Power connect switches but the 24 has an annoying fan and the 8 does not...

 

[BlueLineSwinger]

Yes, that will work just fine.

The only tiny "gotcha" that immediately comes to mind is if the stand-alone switch is gigabit and the router's build-in switch is only 10/100 Mb. Any communication between the devices on the stand-alone and the one hanging off the router will be only 100 Mb. But if that one device's only real network interaction is to the Internet, or it only has a 10/100 NIC itself and/or is some low-data-use device (e.g., a printer), then no worries.

 

[Crosshairs]

Yes, that will work just fine.

The only tiny "gotcha" that immediately comes to mind is if the stand-alone switch is gigabit and the router's build-in switch is only 10/100 Mb. Any communication between the devices on the stand-alone and the one hanging off the router will be only 100 Mb. But if that one device's only real network interaction is to the Internet, or it only has a 10/100 NIC itself and/or is some low-data-use device (e.g., a printer), then no worries.

Thanks, they are both gigabit and its just going to be used for a desktop with light web browsing.

 

[Spartacus09]

Thats exactly how I had mine setup, my main PC got direct connect to the router for least latency possible.
Everything else got attached to the switch down stream, no issue with doing that.

 

[Cmustang87]

Since the other question was already answered: I believe you can replace the fan in the 24 port switch. Is it something like a 2824 or 2724?

 

[Mac2]

Or if the switch doesnt get too hot you can put a resistor inline for the fan power which will consideribly slow down the spin speed and reduce the noise.