Office Overhaul: LinkSys 10/100/1000 Gigabit Switch (SD2008)
As the second part of a major office overhaul, I’ve replaced the 10 MHz hub that used to infest my office with a Gigabit Switch from LinkSys.
For those of you who don’t know, a switch is much more than a hub. Hubs are basically a big piece a wire: they immediately retransmit any electrical signal that comes in from one port onto all the other ports. But a switch is essentially an active bridge between each of its ports: it has all kinds of smarts.
First of all, each port can operate at a different speed than the others, so if you have a mixture of slow and fast networking devices, you can just merrily plug each one into the switch and be happy — each port will operate at maximum speed.
Secondly, this switch autosenses everything: speed, wire polarity (you don’t have to worry about wether or not you should be using a crossover cable), and whether or not the other end supports full-duplex transmission (if it does, you can carry up to twice as much information).
It has source learning: it notices which MAC addresses are on which ports, and when a packet is received which is destined for a particular MAC address, it only sends the packet to the appropriate port, thus reducing needless data collisions.
And it’s fast! (”non-blocking”, to use the term of art): it can transmit gigabit streams without pause on all ports simultaneously. And if it’s transferring data to other slow devices, it doesn’t block I/O to fast devices just because I/O to a slow device hasn’t finished yet.
LinkSys is Cisco’s home and home office brand, and is incredibly solid. It’s working great for me so far.
You have to use at least Category 5e cables to get the gigabit speed, Category 5 cables on 100 MHz ports, or Category 3 cables on 10 Mhz ports.
A happy result: I wasn’t sure whether or not my PowerMac supported gigabit speeds, and the report from “About this Mac…” was not encouraging; it reported a 100 MHz port. But I said to myself, “I’m almost sure that it was supposed to have a gigabit port — it’s probably just reporting its current active setting.” And sure enough, tonight, when I set up the new network and rebooted, the Macintosh is happily reporting a full gigabit.
All that is to the good. The bad? Allow me to quote my Amazon.com review: “Geez, the unbelievable fan noise! It really is, as another reviewer put it, as loud as a 10-year-old PC. I’d actually put it as loud as a 20-year-old PC.”
Right now the switch and the PowerMac are the only two devices on the network that can talk to each other at gigabit speeds. (But mark the sequel!)
$84.99 from Tiger Direct at Amazon.com
18 March 2006 - Hey, the fan noise on this unit has diminished substantially; it’s a completely blameless and happy unit right now. And the box is still cool, really cool (as in, not even warm).
2008 - The original switch above died on me in late 2006. I replaced it with the five-port version (SD2005), and that switch is great! No noise. I guess there are some thermal trade-offs to trying to put 8 ports into a little box.
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