Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Steel, notfred
CasbahBoy wrote:The thing that will differentiate cheap consumer switches and expensive enterprise stuff is the device's "switch fabric"...
TheWacoKid wrote:I've had pretty good luck with the D-Link Green series switches at home - I easily get full gigabit speeds between two machines and haven't noticed any real degradation when loading the switch down with concurrent transfers between two pairs of machines (I don't have more machines than that to test).
Specifically, I have a couple of these: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=495
CasbahBoy wrote:The thing that will differentiate cheap consumer switches and expensive enterprise stuff is the device's "switch fabric", or the logic circuits that handle switching between the ports. Lets say we have an 8-port gigabit switch with two hosts connected to it transferring data (for the sake of example we're going to assume they're saturating their ports at the full theoretical 125MB/s available for data+TCPoverhead). Then we add two more hosts transferring data between each other. A cheap switch at this point (or later, when we add a further two hosts) may reduce throughput for all current transfers as the internal switch fabric won't have the bandwidth or cache required to fully service all of them.
Unfortunately when it comes to figuring out what hardware gives us the best bang for our buck, there isn't a lot we can do beyond looking for detailed benchmarks which isn't very easy because switches aren't as flashy or fast-moving a market as video cards and processors.
(Anyone more knowledgeable than I, you are invited to nitpick this post if this is not entirely correct!)
APWNH wrote:Yes.Will the internet router be able to assign DHCP to all of the switch's clients?
APWNH wrote:That's the one that I'm using.There are switches like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 33-122-111
frumper15 wrote:What you want to do is get a patch panel from here:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subde ... p_id=10514
and some jumpers here:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/subde ... p_id=10208
Terminate all your wiring there and label all the port numbers somewhat logically on both the panel and the wallplates. Then you can get some nice short patch cords to go between the ports you want to be active and your switch. If you want to use some ports for phone instead of networking, just plug an RJ11 cord into that port from your phone line - you could also use some of the ports on the patch panel to wire in the phone lines as well and then just patch between them. You'll get much more reliable connections using a patch panel and factory made jumpers vs. trying to put male ends on the cables themselves. A bit more time and money up front, but it will save you a ton of headaches and heartaches down the road.
I've got a picture of a network rebuild that we did at my last job where short jumpers made a huge difference in managing the system. I'll see if I can dig it up.
APWNH wrote:Do these patch panels give us an easy way to reliably connect cables to it with some kinda tool? I guess that plus some jumpers would have let me skip all the plug crimping. Should have started this thread 8 months ago I guess.
SuperSpy wrote:I don't think this is the case any more with modern desktop switches, from what I have seen most (at least from prominent brands like Netgear, Trendnet, etc.) can handle full or near-full saturation on all ports concurrently. Mostly these days enterprise switches are expensive because of the extra enterprise features, like VLANs and rack mounting hardware, or from redundant hardware like dual power supplies.
Flatland_Spider wrote:That's pretty much it. Switches are hardware limited. Cisco does a good job of posting their specs, but the consumer stuff is a black box.
Switches are also harder to test. I think SmallNetBuilder once stated it's hard to really load up a switch without some really expensive equipment which specializes in that sort of thing. There is software like iperf, and others which I can't remember at the moment, which will test TCP/UPD performance, so that's at least something.
notfred wrote:Ethernet ports will withstand a fair amount of stray voltage, the magnetics will soak up most of it just fine.