??? Two 16port vs. One 24port switch ???

I do not see anything wrong with that.

I've been using three 8 port GB switches on my network for a couple of years now. No problems with that infrastructure, but Newegg finally had a 24 port GB switch on sale for under $100 so I just upgraded. I've been using the 24 port switch for a week now- and I don't notice any difference in performance over the three separate 8 port switches. My setup is a lot simpler and better looking now with the single rack mounted 24 port switch versus the three 8 port switches.

Even though your two 16 port switches will connect to it's own LAN port on the router I don't think you'll see any speed increase over connecting a single larger switch to a single LAN port on the router. Most of your fast traffic will be between source-switch-client without any router involvement. Only slower internet traffic will involve the router.

If you're ready to pull the trigger now- Newegg has a excellent ZyXEL 24 port GB switch on sale for $85 including shipping. Use the promo code on the page to get the $85 price.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...33181153-L020A

What's the speed of the switch on the "router"?

All traffic from devices on switch A to devices on switch B will go through the switch on the router - this could be a bottleneck at times.

Think about 15 (or more) devices on 16 port switch A communicating with 15 (or more) devices on 16 port switch B, ALL sharing the ONE connection between the two switches.

Rather then rely on the switch in the "router" I would connect the "router" switch to a 24 port switch. Then connect the 8 port switch to the 24 port switch.

Yes while web browsing your not going to notice anything but if you get into streaming video, etc then you may well encounter problems caused by such bottlenecks.

So why install a system with potential bottlenecks when it is easily avoided?

It's probably appropriate to separate gaming systems from video streaming systems if you can. Gaming requires instant response to commands which come a random times. Video streaming requires a constant, even flow of packets. In general, the two networking requirements are in conflict with one another. If the two types of usage need to be supported at the same time over the same network, neither will be supported optimally.

If you plug everything into the same switch, it probably would help if you could determine the switch's internal architecture. Some models of switches have several several interconnected networking chips, each connecting to several ports. Traffic among the ports on one chip doesn't have to leave that chip, and thus doesn't interfere with traffic between other ports.

Well my internet connection speed is so slow compared to my gigabit network speed I cannot imagine that the single connection from my "router" to my switch would be a problem regardless of what I was doing.

I would think that game makers would do all they could to keep traffic down if they are hosting the servers that all their customers are connecting to. Now I don't own a game console or play online games so I'm just GUESSING here but I don't think games and game consoles would pose a significant load on your system. YMMV.

How often to you think you will see high traffic between switches?

I mean, most people tend to have one main PC to act as a media/data server. Put that as close to the "center" of your network as possible.

Other than that, the amount of "cross talk" going on is usually pretty minimal. Unless you are planning to have LAN parties at your home or something.

-Suntan

But with two switches, there is no "center", only two "sides". Any traffic between that main PC and devices on the "other side" would need to funnel through that single link connecting the two switches.

Of course, there is nothing keeping you from using multiple links between the two switches. I would bet most switches would load-balance the traffic.

no, you need some kind of link aggregation support.

fcwilt, the only time that you want to casade switches, is if you are using smart seitches. Hooking up multiple switches to the router, will work fine.

Because the OP is intending to share media, they should look at gig switches such as the Netgear GS-108 or such as an example, since gig switches will handle multi & unicast traffic.

Where did you ever get that idea? You don't need smart switches to do that.

A "star of stars" configuration - while not optimum - is quite common.

Certainly with a decent smart switch you can tailor the performance of your network, whatever the configuration of switches, but given the OP was only talking about a small 8 port switch in the office I don't think he would want to have to deal with the admin of a smart switch.

The OP was asking about hooking three switches (one 8 port, two 16 port) to the switch on his "router" - that would be "cascading" - and it would work - but it might create a bottleneck for his intranet traffic.

I would wonder if the switch built into a residential class "router" would have the performance of a dedicated switch such as a HP ProCurve.

fcwilt, again, the smart way for doing cascading switches is using smart switches. If you cascade "dumb switches", you can run into issues in the long run. As for your description of star of stars config, yes there are reasons of doing things that way, but usually it is done when you have a large number of users on multiple floors, so that you are not pulling multiple runs of long lengths of cat-5e or cat-6 into a server or network rack, and having large banks of switches.

For the typical homeowner using a mix of Wifi & wired LAN, a single switch with a patch panel will work for them. If they want to use a "smart switch" or managed switchvs a "dumb switch", and know how to do VLAN's you will come across those, but the majority want simple and do not know how to do VLAN's.

If it was my network, and if I had more than 24 wired LAN connections that were going to be in use all of the time, I would probably go with a 48 port smart switch, and if I was looking at doing some kind of separation and running wired printers, and servers, I would probably use a managed switch.

Again, what the OP is doing, since they are using a router which probably has four ports, they are better to just hook a switch to each port, than cascading them. In reality, when using a router, you are not cascading switches.

Hmm... Interesting theory there. Sigh...

I don't think so. It is true that you would need link aggregation support in order for a single transfer to use multiple ports, but if we are talking about multiple transfers, then there is no reason why the routing tables within even a dumb switch would preclude using multiple ports. Just not more than one link per transfer.

There is no theory about it. Regardless what you think, even though a router may contain a four port switch, it is still not cascading switches, regardless what you believe.

No. Switches don't route and don't have routing tables. (excluding layer 3 switches)

Bonding without link aggregation support on one side is only possible when the device has special support for this (as does Linux). Otherwise, both devices must have some kind of link aggregation support (not necessarily LACP)

Hi dj9,

You're right, they don't have "routing tables". Bad terminology on my part. But they do have "MAC address tables", ranging from 2k to 12k, from what I've seen. Would they not serve the same purpose, where some devices are mapped to the other switch through one port, and other devices through another port?

I can now see how there would need to be a certain amount intelligence that wouldn't exist in an average switch to make that work. But isn't that different from link aggregation?

Sure.

Connecting one switch to another is cascading but connecting one switch to another is NOT cascading.

Whatever you say.

Deep sigh...

NOPE.

Link aggregation, if it can be done cheaply in an home environment(?) just let you have a bigger pipe feeding the switch. It's not peer-to-peer.

I think there are something like 7 switches cascaded in my home network. There are no known performance issues (other than some rooms only being connected at 100 mbit because the in-wall wiring doesn't have all 4 pairs). If there were any issues, I would waste no time in fixing them. The longest path (Internet router to living room equipment) goes through 5 different switches.

I'd prefer to have separate routed networks for different floors/wired/wireless, but there are too many home network applications that work best if all devices are on the same broadcast domain.

I don't think it's worth my time to make things better, and I don't even have the motivation to call someone else to fix everything.

With different traffic patterns, I could definitely see potential performance issues. But it doesn't matter; streaming 1080p works from any location, and that's all that I care about for most of the network. However, even the performance-critical parts

I have seen performace issues in the past caused by switch cascading - I had an Apple AirPort Express (802.11abgn, 100 mbit Ethernet) that would only transfer about 30 mbit/sec over wireless when there were 3 switches between it and the rest of the network. Cutting down to 1 switch made it perform much closer to 100 mbit/sec.


The switches in residential routers should be able to switch close to the total capacity of all ports, unless the address tables are near-full or other advanced features that drop performance are enabled.

The switch chips in residential routers are often quite advanced and have features that are only available in managed switches costing hundreds. mine has VLAN, ACLs as high as layer 4, QoS, and more, though most this functionality isn't exposed to the user. It's nice to have advanced switch capability like this, as the switch configuration can be exposed by third party firmware (like OpenWRT) and I can use it to force ports to 10/100 to avoid gigabit negotiation issues with bad cabling.

I have an 8 port web managed gigabit switch (Dell PowerConnect 2708) that supports link aggregation (had another, but it died). I don't remember paying more than $10/port for them (was years ago). I don't even bother turning on managed mode anymore.

The latest versions (Dell PowerConnect 2800 series) are $18-22/port MSRP and support 8/16/24/48 ports, and they might not even be the cheapest out there.

Well when I spoke of a "star of stars" its just that - the main switch feeds the remote locations and in some locations there is a small 5-8 port switch to handle the multiple devices at a given location.

These days with TVs, AVRs, BD/DVD players, Game Consoles, etc all needing network connections a small switch seems to be a reasonable solution.

Computers get their own connection to keep the performance up when transferring files to one of the servers - say during a backup operation.

So there is at most two switches between any two devices on the LAN.


Good to know.


I'm not sure if you install 3rd party firmware it's still a "residential" switch.

Thanks for the info.

I hear Cisco switches are tops. Are they still hard to configure? Comes with ez web interface?

I've run three concurrent HD (mix of 720p and 1080p) streams from the Gb NIC on my FreeNAS server with absolutely no issues whatsoever. I've even done large file uploads to the NAS while two HD streams were running (I was waiting for yelling from the other rooms )- again, no issues whatsoever.
Don't think you'll ever see the need for dual NIC's in your server- especially with Gb switch(s) and cat5/6.



You haven't mentioned your intended NAS OS yet? Are you still researching or are you set on one of the three popular options- WHS, UnRAID, and FreeNAS...

Win 7 Home as a server OS may end up being your bottleneck.

Have you considered one of the true NAS OS's like FreeNAS or UnRAID running on your existing hardware?