Seeking advice on home LAN upgrade

[Rdavies6]

I have a (currently) fairly simple home network with a NAS, a few wired clients, & a couple of wireless LANS supporting Apple TV, PS3, Wii, laptops, iPads, surround sound processors etc. All runs flawlessly from a single wireless router right now (a Draytek 2820Vn - which I wouldn’t swap for anything). However I have just got a second NAS (with dual Gigabit ports) and have no ports left on my router, so I'm planning some re-engineering work as soon as I can get the RFC approved by the family change advisory board.

In my simple network expansion I was envisaging just hanging a new gigabit switch (I've been eying the 8-port Netgear GS108T) off the router; there's a single Gbit port on the router that's perfect for this. I then thought about moving all the wired devices to the new switch. However with the future plans I have I can easily see myself running out of physical port capacity on my proposed new switch as well (I plan to add a Stratum 1 NTP server, Freeswitch appliance & laser printer at some point soon, plus I may move to link aggregation for a Mac Pro and the new NAS). However the router will still have a few unused 100BaseT ports

I suppose I could just buy a bigger switch in the first place (more cost, potentially not fanless designs, more power consumption); hang a second switch of the router; or maybe I could just use the remaining ports on the router. I wondered what were the merits of each approach were, and the best way to move forward? Some of the wired devices I have (Sonos, Gigaset VoIP phone) are 100BaseT devices only and probably not benefit from Gbit connectivity. Would I be most sensible to relegate the 100BaseT devices to the spare ports on the router or maybe get a second switch for the non-Gbit devices, or does this all not matter?

Any thoughts or guidance from the gurus on the forum?

Many Thanks

Robin

 

[Jeroen1000]

In terms of performance (throughput) I'd say it really won't matter where you put the 100 megabit devices. Latency wise, it does not matter either. Save the switchports on the Netgear for true gigabit devices.

However, I'm not completely sure how you will benefit from the gigabit port on the Draytek. The only benefit I can think of is that multiple gigabit clients can communicate at the full 100 mbit speed with the 100 megabit clients on the Draytek. I.E. if you were to connect the gigabit switch to a 100 megabit port on the Draytek, and 2 gigabit clients on the future switch start pumping data to 2 100 megabit clients, those 2 gigabit clients will have to share that 100 megabit and thus, both will be slowed down. I've been dying to test this assumption out but I never seem to find the time to do this.

For future proof design, it would be a shame to have to connect a second (probably gigabit) switch on a 100 megabit port on the Draytek IF you need communication between that and the first gigabit switch you connected to the Draytek's gigabit LAN port. If you plan to extent further I'd suggest cascading the gigabit switches.

Disclaimer: I'm not a guru so don't take my advice for being 100% accurate.

 

[thiggins]

You can uplink multiple switches. If you add a second Gigabit switch, you can just connect it to the first.

Connecting 10/100 devices to a Gigabit port will not improve their performance. So connect them to the router switch.