Gigabit Switch question

jrwagh333 · 11 Jul 2010 at 15:46

My personal PC is on the top floor of the house in the attic. The main PC in the house where the Internet cable comes in from the street is on the 2nd floor of the house.

We have the cable going into the router and then a 100mb/s ethernet cable going up the wall in the 2nd floor and coming through the floor of the 3rd floor. This way I get 100mb/s network speed.

On the 3rd floor there are 2 PC's. One is the main PC for the room and the other is a HTPC. The main PC does all the ripping of files and once that files are ripped they need to be transfered over to the HTPC. Well seeing as they are BluRays being ripped they are huge in size and take a long time to put onto an external drive and then transfer that way.

What I wanted to do was buy a Gigabit switch to connect my main PC & the HTPC to the internet. Now I have done this already with a 100mb switch and all is good. But I wanted to upgrade to a Gigabit switch to make file transfers faster. I wanted to know if it would be a problem to have a 100mb/s ethernet cable coming into the switch & then gigabit cables coming out and into the other PC's.

Yes I understand that I will only be able to get up to 100mb/s from the routher. BUT from PC to PC on the same floor. Will I be able to get 1Gb/s speeds?

I ask because if the cable coming into the switch is only 100mb/s, will it slow down the other ports?

andicole0 · 11 Jul 2010 at 15:52

If your 100Mbs cable is Cat5e it will run at 1Gbps but will not be 'guaranteed' to be error free.

I have Cat 6 on most of my network but still have some Cat 5 parts with Gigabit switches and still get a 1Gbps connection.

Try it and see, I suspect you'll be OK.

Andi.

james.miller · 11 Jul 2010 at 15:54

no it wont be a problem and yes you will get full speeds (depends on the hard drives and what not, you know).

also, what you want is a Tenda gigabit switch. they do exactly what it says on the tin and they are fantastic value - the 5 port version is £23 and this is the one i own. No problems with it at all, transfers data as fast as my hard drives can read/write

jrwagh333 · 11 Jul 2010 at 16:13

Thanks guys... So Cat5e will work but to be 100% safe I should buy Cat6?

andicole0 · 11 Jul 2010 at 16:15

jrwagh333 said:
Thanks guys... So Cat5e will work but to be 100% safe I should buy Cat6?

I wouldn't bother changing any cables unless you start having problems - which you probably won't.

New cable should be Cat6 as it's pretty much the same price (well if you make your own).

Andi.

Dist · 11 Jul 2010 at 18:56

jrwagh333 said:
Thanks guys... So Cat5e will work but to be 100% safe I should buy Cat6?

Cat5e is perfectly fine for gigabit ethernet. The only time I would upgrade to Cat 6 is if you plan on adding new cable anyway (cat 6 will future proof you a bit, being capable of greater speeds over short distances, but thats a long way off), or if you run the cable alongside sources of interference, such as right next to long lengths of power cables in the walls.

Cat5e can do gigabit ethernet up to 100m, which is the maximum length of any ethernet cable so there is definitely no big reason to change cable at all.