Throughput Impact of Multiple Switches vs. 1 Switch

[BostonDan]

Does anyone know the impact on throughput from utilizing two 8-port GB Switches compared to one 32-port GB Switch?
I'm implementing a home lan with a Media Server (2 HD Homerun tuners), four HD media players, along with 4 other PC's and miscellaneous network peripherals (NAS's, print servers, etc...) Because of my house layout, it will be much easier if 2 switches are used compared to 1. I already own the two 8-port GB switches.
The reason for going to 32 ports is to cover future upgrades to my lan. If there is no big impact, I will go to two 16-port GB switches eventually. Appreciate any advice.

 

[thiggins]

You won't see any impact.

 

[BostonDan]

Throughput Impact

Thanks Tim.
To satisfy my personal curiousity, although I won't see any impact in my current layout, is there an impact on maximum throughput from adding the additional switch, and if yes, how much does it impact maximum throughput? Sorry, it's the engineer in me.

 

[zx10guy]

There is a potential throughput limitation when you traverse traffic externally from the switch's backplane. You're limited to the speed of the link between switches. If your network traffic profile is such that inter switch traffic will consume or exceed the throughput of the physical conenction btween the switches, you'll see a network performance impact.

The ways around this is to prevent network intensive traffic from ever leaving the switch so all this traffic stays within the switch's backplane, use a higher speed network link with enough capacity to deal with your worst theoretical traffic throughput, or linking multiple physical links into an aggregated/virtual pipe which approximates the same effect of having one single faster link.

 

[thiggins]

To satisfy my personal curiousity, although I won't see any impact in my current layout, is there an impact on maximum throughput from adding the additional switch, and if yes, how much does it impact maximum throughput? Sorry, it's the engineer in me.

zx10guy has pointed out the relevant issue.

 

[BostonDan]

Thanks zx10guy and thiggins for your help. Appreciated.