Upgrade to Gigabit LAN, old equipment still usable?

[swsampson]

I have two desktops and one laptop on my Netgear Wireless-G 4-port 10/100 router/switch. I want to get a network attached storage device and upgrade my LAN to gigabit. This presents some questions:

1. Can get a gigabit switch and still use the router built into the 10/100 netgear router/switch? And still get gigabit speed over my LAN?

2. I will need new gigabit NICs for my computers. Is there any reason to leave the current 10/100 NICs in there too? And run two NICs in each computer.

3. Could I expect any boost in performance on my WAN connection with gigabit? I'm on a cable modem.

Thanks for any advice y'all have for me!

[classicsoftware]

I don't think you will notice any improvement from your cable modem. The speed you get is the speed you get and I don't think (though I could be wrong and other are free to say why) the NIC is your rate limiting step.

You will need to upgrade your hub/switch. Most will do all three. You will get increased performance from your wireless..

Do you have a dedicated server with NT or Win2K server or Windows 2003 server????

Please tell us more about your network.

[swsampson]

My network is just a home set up with file sharing between all of the computers. I'd like to set up a NAS device. The one disadvantage of the NAS is that the read/write speeds to the hard drive are dependent upon the speed of your network (as I understand it). Bearing this in mind, I think I should upgrade from a 10/100 network to a gigabit network -- more speed, faster read/write speeds from the client computers to the NAS.

I realize I'll need a new switch but I don't know if I need a new router too. Is it possible to continue to use my current 10/100 router with built in switch? How would I hook the new gigabit switch up to it? Wouldn't I loose the gigabit speed by plugging a switch into the 10/100 router?

The reason I ask is that it appears gigabit switch-only devices appear to be less expensive than gigabit routers with a built in switch.

[Rick]

The first thing you need to look at is the speed of the NAS

Most are only 10/100 at least those I have seen are

Depending on how you connect the gig and the old 10/100 router up.
The speed may in fact drop to 10/100 on the new switch

What I did was run One connection from the old 10/100 router to the new switch Via the wan on the router
Then I connected everything to the switch so the router only assigns the IP to each system and device ( including NAS)

It does nothing to improve speed off the web. ( Modem is 5Mb.)

[Erik]

There really isn't much point in upgrading a home LAN to gigabit, unless you are a true geek and want it just for the cool factor. ;)

Anyway the speed of transfers will be limited by the slowest link on the LAN. So even if you have a gigabit switch, but keep an old 10/100 NIC you will get NO benefit form it. In order to get the gigabit speed you need to upgrade everything to gigabit, NIC's, switches, and routers.

[swsampson]

Yes, the NAS I'm looking at does have a gigabit adapter on it. It's the Buffalo TeraStation: http://www.buffalotech.com/products/product-detail.php?productid=97&categoryid=19

So it's not just a geek factor to have a gigabit LAN. I need it to get the full speed potential out of my NAS. I only want the hard drive speed to limit my read/write duration, not the network speed.

As for the NICs, I realize those need to be replaced. My question is prmarily if there is any way to continue using the router built into my NetGear WGR 614 combo router/switch.

Rick, it sound like you had a solution but I didn't quite understand how you hooked things up. Could you explain in more detail?

[classicsoftware]

What the heck are you storing on 1000 GB of storage for $500.00 + upgrading your LAN.

It seems to be overkill.

How about some external HARD drives, USB 2.0 or firwire????

[Rick]

The break down of my net work is easy

I have everything hooked up to The 16 port switch
In no special order .
To access the router and the internet I have the router hooked to the switch by way of the routers WAN ( Wide area network port) and port number 1 on the switch

My Nas is not the high end model you have .. It is a simple add on with one of the extra 200 gb drives I had around the house.

When connected and mapped the NAS shows up on the Winxp Pro system as a win95 system with a fat 32 drive ..
When I check the properties of it

[classicsoftware]

If this is a simple peer to peer network, I would use a USB or Firewire external drive and shre it rather than using an NAS and upgrading my wiring to Gigabit ethernet.

[Variable]

No, Swampson is asking a good question. This will be common in homes in the not so distant future. The basic answer to question #1 is Yes. If you have all PC's with gigabit NIC's hooked into a Gigabit switch you will have gigabit network speeds possible. The router is the route out of the LAN. The default gateway. Switchs allow full duplex communication to two computers talking to each other that are connected in the same switch. The router won't come into play at all unless, the traffic is not destined for the LAN i.e. out the default gateway(router)> Switch's use VLANs. Default set up would probably be one VLAN unless you have a lot of PC's.


Question 2 -Having two NIC's set at different speeds in one PC. I cannot see why this would be useful for most people. I have two NIC's in mine set to two different networks but that is simply for ease of programming devices. I doubt your PC's could handle all the data of a gigabit lan let alone adding another 100Mb card. But if you wanted to connect two separate networks you could. Then you would need to setup up some static routes so that computer knew where to send traffic. Otherwise, which NIC would the computer send outgoing traffic on? The answer is the first one listed.

Question 3 has already been answered.

If your concerned with I/O (input/output) on your drive system, you will be MUCH happier with SCSI. SATA drives just do not have the real world I/O as SCSI. We have boxes at work where people tried moving SQL databases onto a SATA array and had unacceptable drops in performance. You can mitigate this with striping over a large array but I think you would be really pleased with a SCSI array vrs a cheaper solution.
At least make sure you can return the NAS if it doesn't live up to your expectations.

Variable

[superdrumr]

I would definately do the upgrade. I have gigabit cards in my two desktops and laptop (which are wired into a dedicated gigabit swtich) and the speed difference is quite noticable.

That being said you will only see the speed difference when it comes to file transfers, not internet. At most your internet is probably 4Mbps while your wireless provides at least 11Mbps, so you have overhead there.

When doing hte upgrade, just get the new gigabit switch, plug the uplink port from the switch into a port on your router. Then connect your two computers and the NAS device into ports on your gigabit switch.

Finally, after reading some reviews i would reconsider getting the Buffalo Terastation, apparently its transfer speeds aren't very good. If you can get your hands on a cheap Pentium II or III computer and just hookup the hard drives and gigabit card to that, you'll probably get better performance (and it will probably be cheaper too).