A question on Gigabit switches and routers

brakeinup

brakeinup

brakeinup

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I am looking at going down the Gigabit road as the wife has to transfer lots of large image files after processing to a NAS box and other PC for backups.

Are the wireless routers with built in Gigabit switches fine for the job or is it best to seperate the switch from the router? Thanks
 
It depends on how good the actual switch is built into the router and how realistically you actually need Gigabit.
It is all well and fine running gigabit switches but is your cabling upto it ? Have you terminated your sockets with less than 30mm of exposed pairs keeping all of the twists in place ? Are all of the bends in your cable very shallow radius ? Have you made sure that non of your CAT5e cables run parallel with mains cable with a good 300m separation ? If your CAT5e crosses mains cable is it running at right angles ?

All of these tings will serve to rapidly degrade the quality of your network if you answered NO.

A well installed TX100 Network with a quality layer 2/3 switch will perform far better than a shoddily installed Gigabit network - and generally is more forgiving. I shove some pretty big files around at work on a TX100 network connected to my MAC OSX Server, with 10 other users hung off it and we see no lag or packet loss at all.

You will find that the NAS is your limitting factor, we repalced our NAS (Snap Server) with another MAC G4 Running OSX Server and it is about 10 x 15 times faster.
 
Thanks for the replies.

The network is going to be wired - the wireless is for the laptop.

Its a home network with 2 PC's with gigabit ethernet cards, a NAS (Buffalo LinkStation) with a gigabit ethernet connection and a laptop on wireless.

The main reason for the gigabit path is to speed up file transfers to the NAS and other PC.

I understand about a quality install for cabling and a good quality switch but I do not think there is any need to go to enterprise level hardware to speed up file transfers at home.

Thinking about it seperate hardware is usually better for the role it needs to do but if I can reduce the amount of peripherals and power adapters needed than that would be a better solution as long as theres a noticable speed increase from the current Linksys wireless routers' 100mb built in switch.
 
If you do go gigabit make sure your hardware supports jumbo frames or you will find you don't get anything like the full benefit.
 
The major difference is going to be how much easier it is to get a separate router and gigabit switch, especially if it's an ADSL router you're after (you haven't said whether it's cable or ADSL you've got).
 
What NAS box are you running as that will make a difference. We had a NSLU2 at work and it was very very poor. If you are just using an old pc with gigabit card you should be ok
 
who exactly decided to call it jumbo frames?? it really annoys me for some reason, it's not a new technology, it's setting the mtu to 9000, thats all!
 
Im on ntl cable and am using the Linksys Wrt54G wireless router with the built in 100mb switch.

The NAS is just a Buffalo Linkstation 300gb with the gigabit NIC.

I am trying to reduce the amount of hardware that has to be plugged in, but if a separate gigabit switch is better than a router with a gigabit switch then I will buy a separate switch. If there is no major difference then I will get something like a Belkin wireless router with built in gigabit.
 
fluiduk said:
I would get seperate switch in case you move or switch broadband types in the future.
Click to expand...

I have come to the same conclusion. The router I have does a great job. If I get a seperate switch then I can still go to 100mb if that fails.

Thanks for all of the replies :)
 
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