10/100, gigabit mixed network question

[jrfuda]

Gang, take a look at the attached diagram.

I need to buy a couple of switches for my network. I recently picked-up several netcams and no longer have enough open ports on the exiting router and swith I have, so I was going to buy more switches.

I saw that compusa has this switch: http://www.compusa.com/products/product_in...0011&pfp=BROWSE on sale for $19.99. So I was going to get them, rather than 10/100 switches, and at the same time update the NICs in my twp desktops to gigabit at the same time.

So my question is, will I actually have gigabit comms among the devices that are colored red in my diagram, or does everything still have to go through the router, which will bering the speed doen to 100 Mbps? I'm assuming since they're switches and keep their own tables, that they should not need to go to the router, unless what they're talking to is on the other side of the router. Am I correct? I hope so, becuase the cheapest gigabit router I could find was about $120.

 

[rocco]

John,
Traffic on your local network would not involve the router, so it's speed would not matter. The specs of that router (on the CompUSA website) imply that you would get gigabit speeds between your red devices.

 

[frankdr]

John,

I'll second that - You will have gigabit speed between the red items. You will probably hit CPU, disk etc limits well before you hit the network speed limit.

-Frank

 

[WayneW]

That switch doesn't support jumbo packets, which is needed if you REALLY want to get max speed. But for the price, I don't think you can go wrong. SMC is the only gig switch that I know of with jumbo packets & priced for home (about $90 last time I looked).

 

[jrfuda]

Thanks for the feedback guys.

My intent is to partially future-proof (at least near-future-proof) my network, so if I ever get around to having multiple HTPCs sharing multimedia contained on a central server, I won't have any hesitation. I know 10/100 is fine for audio, but DVDs on a HDD will require more bandwidth. I'm assuming that these swithces will be able to handle this without the jumbo packet requirement.

My other need is to be able to have a central location to backup my three existing "production" PCs (HS/ML Server, Tablet, & every-day desktop) that doesn't take forvever to write to. I have an old PIII 800 in piecces that I may turn into a NAS, since I can buy big 250G+ HDDs for less that $90 when the price is right, and it's a lot cheaper to use them in an old PC as a file server, than it would be to buy a NAS device for $120 and only be able to use one HDD in it.... (the lowest price NAS device I could find was $120, and it still needs a HDD, so I'd have to still spend around $90 for the HDD, so that would be, say $210 per 250GB of storage, and - by the way - theses only run at 10/100 speeds, whereas my homebrew NAS could run a gigabit )