Hiya,
No problems here just advice requested.
Is it better to connect my 5-6 devices directly to a router (lets assume i have an 8-port router) rather than to an 8-port switch which is hanging off the router?
I'm going to guess that for the LAN it would make no difference but for the internet it would make a tiny amount of difference. Would this be correct?
Thanks :)
The device that is now commonly known as a Router is actually a combination Router and Switch.
The router part distributes the source port (normally connected to an internet source), to the lan side ports and for ease of use these are located in a single case.
There are also those that connect to a phone line which incorporate a Modem before the router, and wireless routers that add a wireless subsystem
As for the difference in performance I would expect any changes to be in the favour of the combination unit as the components are more likely to be matched
At first i was thinking that when using a switch, the 5 devices would be switched and sent over a single ethernet cable to the router/modem for the internets and that would be less... efficient. Then i was thinking if i didn't use a switch, perhaps the CPU on the router might be more taxed having to perform switching functions.
I'm probably asking a ridiculous question and the difference, either way, is probably tiny. I do this. I over think things.
Switching is a relatively simple hardware function and would not use the routers CPU.
One scenario for using a switch - if you have an old router that only supports 100Mbit, but you have several devices that need to talk to each other (transfer files etc), and the devices go via the router, your max transfer speed is 100 Mbit. If the devices are connected via a 1Gbit switch, they can transfer files at full speed.
Many years ago, before I had a home network, I was always puzzled as to why my pc had a gigabit lan card - who has these kind of internet speeds ? Naive or what . . .
There is no reason to add a switch unless you ran out of ports on the router.
But, in my opinion, a switch is also a matter of convenience. If you had 3 or 4 computers on the 2nd floor, you can just run them to a switch instead of running wires back down to the router.
One thing that I forgot to mention is the difference between a Switch and a HUB
A hub is a dumb device and all the signals received at any single port is transferred to all other ports whereas a switch actually reads the address data of each data packet and directs it to the correct port.
Hubs are still available and due to their design are much less efficient than a Switch due to data collisions
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