Quote:
Originally Posted by tcraig72 /forum/post/18176955
So if I have an old hub lying around I can use that?
You could by why would you want to? As a temporary solution, I can see just throwing it in to get you going. But with switches being so cheap these days, you're short changing yourself network performance wise.
To expand on what Jim said, the reason why switches are superior to hubs is due to the ability of the switch to maintain traffic separation between the switch and what is pluged into it on a given port. Switches work by forwarding frames to specific devices based on the destination MAC embedded in the frame header. The switch keeps a MAC table which lists what MAC address is on what port. This creates network efficiency as not all frames are sent to all ports as is the case with a hub. The other performance gain is via the host connected devices. With hubs, all ports see all traffic and as a result each host device must process each frame it sees regardless of whether the frame was intended for that host or not.
The other advantages of switches is the ability to have devices run at full duplex and the ability to limit the collision domains between just the switch and the device connected to it.