Manage the unmanageable...

September 18, 2006 12:52 PM

Will an unmanaged gigabit switch slow gigabit devices when non-gigabit devices are on the same network?

I recently got an unmanaged gigabit switch because I have a network attached storage box that should be able to work at gigabit speeds with my desktop. However, my laptop only supports 10/100 ethernet. Is my laptop going to slow the connection between the desktop and the storage due to the fact that the switch is unmanaged?

posted by tysiva to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Shouldn't. Unmanaged just means you can't monitor and configure the switch with standard network management protocols.
posted by Good Brain at 1:02 PM on September 18, 2006

No, it won't. the 10/100 device will just talk to the switch at 10/100. It won't slow everything else down.

You might be thinking it's like a USB 2.0 hub - plugging a USB 1.1 device in can/will slow everything down, but ethernet isn't like that.
posted by drstein at 1:04 PM on September 18, 2006

Assuming your switch has enough per port memory, no. One problem on small switches with only a few ports is that the backplane may be based on a chip set that is truly gigabit between all ports, but when the switch is fully loaded, the work of buffering, error correction, and other work done by the individual port chip sets can happen faster than the switching layer can work, due to processing and memory constraints. Processing and memory improvements both cost money, so these kinds of unmanaged switches typically do only miminal processing for the few ports they support, hence no advanced features like large frame support, etc.

So, the answer to your question may be "No, you won't see a slow down." if your cables are good quality, your laptop isn't contributing much traffic to the NAS port when your desktop is using NAS, and there aren't any other obvious network problems catching up with you. Experience is a pretty good teacher in this, but if your NAS and your desktop have gigabit chip sets that can support large frames, you'd see a performance improvement by buying a more sophisticated switch.
posted by paulsc at 1:09 PM on September 18, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

... but ethernet isn't like that.
Actually, it is - which is why you use a switch rather than a hub. A hub basically parallels everything together, forcing them all to talk at the speed of the slowest. A switch buffers and switches packets between individual devices, so each can talk at their maximum speed - overall throughput between any 2 devices will still be limited to the speed of the slower device, but it doesn't affect other devices on the same switch.

FWIW, you can get USB switches that work the same way, but they're not common - because, unlike ethernet, USB is primarily a master/slave connection.
posted by Pinback at 3:12 PM on September 18, 2006

FWIW, you can get USB switches that work the same way, but they're not common - because, unlike ethernet, USB is primarily a master/slave connection.

So, since you brought it up, where can one buy such things? (I have a couple older USB 1.x devices and I'd rather not slow down my USB 2.x devices that are currently sharing the same USB hub.)
posted by Alex Handcoding at 6:50 PM on September 18, 2006

Thank you all- I got some very solid answers and the answers were the ones I wanted :-)
Thanks, folks.
posted by tysiva at 9:55 PM on September 18, 2006

Pinback: uh, yeah, but nobody mentioned using a hub. Your information is good, but irrelevant. :-)
posted by drstein at 3:23 PM on September 19, 2006