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Charken

New Around Here
I'm wondering if someone can help me with some issues that I've been facing recently. I will try and explain...

I have a Virgin Cable Super Hub and from this I have one cable that connects to an 8 port gigabit Netgear Switch (GS608). From this switch my main PC, my NAS and a printer are connected. Also from this switch there are two other switches connected.

The first is a 10/100 Mbs Netgear which is very old but not causing a problem, connected to this there is a Sky+ HD box and a Western Digital Live box. This connects to the Playroom TV.

The second is a recently purchased 5 port gigabit Netgear Switch (GS605). Connected to this switch there is an HTPC and another Sky+ HD box. This also connects up to my main TV.

The connection between the switches is Cat6, all other cables are a mixture of CAT6 and CAT5e.

The problem is that when I stream HD content from my NAS to the HTPC I get a lot of stuttering. A simple file transfer from the NAS to my HTPC yields transfer rates of ~1MBs. This is not good. If the HTPC is connected straight to the wall and therefore connected to the 8 port switch then I get ~60MBs. However the introduction of the switch causes problems, but not all the time. There are periods when it works fine on other ports and I've had transfer speeds of ~30MBs. But this seems temperamental.

I have tried connecting the 5 port switch to the Virgin Router and that seems to work, however it seems the the Virgin Router is not good at buffering and there can be some stutter when there are other network activities going on. Although file transfers are quick, ~70MBs.

I'm pretty sure all the cabling is OK as I have replaced or bypassed much of it, except for the external CAT6. However what I cannot do is detect what my Sky boxes are doing. If they are downloading movies et al, as part of their Anytime service would that kill the bandwidth for for the HTPC? However the Sky box only has a 100Mbs network card, the light is orange and not green on the switch, and I have tried leaving the Sky box unplugged from the network with no increase in performance.

When this originally started happening I thought the 5 port switch was faulty so it was replaced like for like. However the same is still happening.

Can anyone give me some idea of what is going on here, or something else to try?

Much appreciated and thanks.

Charles
 
I would need to see how the switches and devices are connected.
It is possible for the 10/100 switch and devices to cause problems with Gigabit devices, depending on how everything is connected.
When Flow Control is not a Good Thing

A simple way to test this is to unplug your 10/100 switch and see if the problems go away.
 
I have drawn this diagram of my home network. I hope this explains the layout. In the meantime I have tested things a bit further and it seems that it is only downloading from my NAS to my HTPC where the speed is slow. Uploading files is much faster ~30MB/s.

I am in the process of reading the link you posted. However I powered off the 10/100 Mbs switch and that didn't affect the issues.
 

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One other thing to note which I mentioned above, is that if I move the cable that links the 8 port switch to the 5 port switch to the Virgin Super Hub or vice-a-versa the speed goes up to around 30MB/s for a limited time. I don't know how long this will last as I haven't tested it properly, but will work for some days.

I don't know what happens to drop the speed after some time.
 
One other thing to note which I mentioned above, is that if I move the cable that links the 8 port switch to the 5 port switch to the Virgin Super Hub or vice-a-versa the speed goes up to around 30MB/s for a limited time. I don't know how long this will last as I haven't tested it properly, but will work for some days.
That would indicate some sort of incompatibility between the two NETGEAR switches, which I don't know why there would be.
 
I have drawn this diagram of my home network. I hope this explains the layout. In the meantime I have tested things a bit further and it seems that it is only downloading from my NAS to my HTPC where the speed is slow. Uploading files is much faster ~30MB/s.

I am in the process of reading the link you posted. However I powered off the 10/100 Mbs switch and that didn't affect the issues.

Two many switches in use here and worst if you daisy chain them will degrade network throughput a lot more than using 1 switch. Why not buy a managed switch gigabit one to handle the traffic you have. 16-port would do it for you. This way you can manage the port speed of the 10/100 devices too. Set the gigabit devices to 1000mbp instead of auto, but only if the devices on the other end can be change on their NIC = network interface card through software to full 1gbps. Otherwise leaving them set to auto is good enough.

If you use one managed switch you would need to run the CATxx cables from the one switch to the other clients in your dwelling.
 
Thanks for that response.

The two switches connected to the 8 port one are in two separate rooms in my house.

A few years ago I had the Cat6 cables run around the outside of my house, so running new cables isn't an option right now as we intend to move soon. However in a new house I will take that on board and run a cable for each device with some overhead for further devices, xbox, ps4 etc. As you say a 16 port switch would suffice, would it need to be managed?

It's a shame that simply daisy chaining the switches together doesn't just simply work, maybe Apple needs to produce some home network hardware to address such issues!

Thanks for your help.
 
One more thing, out of curiosity, if I were to buy a 16 or 24 port switch today which model numbers would you recommend? No harm in doing a bit of homework now!

Thanks.
 
You don't need a managed switch. Daisy chaining switches should normally work fine. If delinking through the Virgin box works leave it at that or try a different brand for one of the two switches.
 
So far I have manually set the NIC on the HTPC to 1 Gigabit speed and at this stage the it seems to be holding at around 20MB/sec. Which is enough to stream HD content. I'll see how this holds out, although I don't understand why this doesn't simply work at full speed.

Thanks for your comments and help.
 
Daisy chained switches

HI: My LAN is using daisy chained switches, one Cisco SG200-08, one Dlink DGS 1008D and three Trendnet TEGs59g switches and one DLink 655 router used as a wireless access point and switch (DHCP turned off). These are all gigabit devices and everything seems to be functioning perfectly. Generally switches keep track of where messages need to go by remembering MAC addresses of sources and targets in packet data. There seems to be a 256 Mac address limit to the smaller switches. It does not sound as though you have violated Mac address limits. If any of the switches have routing capabilities, i.e. DHCP or are actually router/switches they should be configured as access points. If too many of your attached devices spend a lot of time talking on the internet they may be overwhelming the main router and switch. Good luck with this. George 5164
 
One other thing to note which I mentioned above, is that if I move the cable that links the 8 port switch to the 5 port switch to the Virgin Super Hub or vice-a-versa the speed goes up to around 30MB/s for a limited time. I don't know how long this will last as I haven't tested it properly, but will work for some days.

I don't know what happens to drop the speed after some time.

This tells me that your 8 port switch is having erratic behavior. Only when you remove this switch does the problem go away.

Try replacing with a different switch if you have one, and see if that fixes your problem.

Or, conversely, you might be having a problem with the 5 port switch, since you still have the problem a few days later. I would bet money on one of those switches being the problem.
 

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