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Hi Jammrock
Yes you can replace a hub with a switch just like that.
And yes, it is much faster. In some cases.
The great thing about a switch is that it is much more clever than a hub. For instance it learns which PC is on what plug in the switch. Therefore, when one PC has to get in contact with another PC, it doesn't have to ping all ports to find the right one (which takes time and gives colisions).
Also, a normal hub (for instance an 8 port 10 MBit) will divide all the bandwidth between all ports in use at any giving time. This means that when PC-A is talking to PC-B and PC-C is talking to PC-D the two tasks will split the 10 MBit capacity. On a switch each task has 10 MBit capacity.
This is easy demonastraited on a simple network. Lets couple 8 PC together with a hub. The six of the PC's play say Alien vs Predator together. The remaining two PC's does nothing. In this scenario you will notice that all the gaming PC's constantly throw data into the hub. Many times two PC's will do this at the same time so the two bits of data will colide. Therefore the PC's throw the data out again, hoping noone is using the network at that particular moment.
Since gaming doesn't require large amounts of data transfer, the constant colisions will eat away the effective bandwidth.
If then the to PC's that do not play the game starts to transfer a file between them selves, they will try to steal bandwidth from the gaming PC's. And due to the large amounts of colisions, the data transfer will be very slow and the gamimg people will instantly start screaming over choppiness in their game.
I have seen this many times before at smaller parties, which did not feature a switch. At a local party which is held every other weekend, this was how we use to have it. We even would get timeouts on network connections because of the heavy hammering games do.
Then we finaly got enough money to buy a 8 port switch, and now the network runs silky smooth.
I hope this did sheed some light for you.
Ghydda
------------------
A slowly desintegrating nobody, soon with an AMD K7 600 with 256MB Memorycard PC100, Adaptec 2940UW, Adaptec 2904CD, 3 SCSI HD, JVC cooking equipment, Plextor 40Max, SBlive Value with homemade S/PDIF I/O-card and last but not least - Matrox Marvel G200 AGP 16MB SD
Only thing missing:
Matrox RT2000
[This message has been edited by Ghydda (edited 08-17-1999).]
Yes you can replace a hub with a switch just like that.
And yes, it is much faster. In some cases.
The great thing about a switch is that it is much more clever than a hub. For instance it learns which PC is on what plug in the switch. Therefore, when one PC has to get in contact with another PC, it doesn't have to ping all ports to find the right one (which takes time and gives colisions).
Also, a normal hub (for instance an 8 port 10 MBit) will divide all the bandwidth between all ports in use at any giving time. This means that when PC-A is talking to PC-B and PC-C is talking to PC-D the two tasks will split the 10 MBit capacity. On a switch each task has 10 MBit capacity.
This is easy demonastraited on a simple network. Lets couple 8 PC together with a hub. The six of the PC's play say Alien vs Predator together. The remaining two PC's does nothing. In this scenario you will notice that all the gaming PC's constantly throw data into the hub. Many times two PC's will do this at the same time so the two bits of data will colide. Therefore the PC's throw the data out again, hoping noone is using the network at that particular moment.
Since gaming doesn't require large amounts of data transfer, the constant colisions will eat away the effective bandwidth.
If then the to PC's that do not play the game starts to transfer a file between them selves, they will try to steal bandwidth from the gaming PC's. And due to the large amounts of colisions, the data transfer will be very slow and the gamimg people will instantly start screaming over choppiness in their game.
I have seen this many times before at smaller parties, which did not feature a switch. At a local party which is held every other weekend, this was how we use to have it. We even would get timeouts on network connections because of the heavy hammering games do.
Then we finaly got enough money to buy a 8 port switch, and now the network runs silky smooth.
I hope this did sheed some light for you.
Ghydda
------------------
A slowly desintegrating nobody, soon with an AMD K7 600 with 256MB Memorycard PC100, Adaptec 2940UW, Adaptec 2904CD, 3 SCSI HD, JVC cooking equipment, Plextor 40Max, SBlive Value with homemade S/PDIF I/O-card and last but not least - Matrox Marvel G200 AGP 16MB SD
Only thing missing:
Matrox RT2000
[This message has been edited by Ghydda (edited 08-17-1999).]
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