Switches

[Habitat]

Hi Guys and Gals
I have recently went through 2 switches in the last 2 years. One was a Gigabyte switch, one of those really small compact one and now recently an ALFA AFS08E. Is it me or am I expecting too much, should a switch not last longer than 1 year? We only use it to play lan parties every now and again (every 2 months for about 10 hours on the trot). I would like to replace the ALFA as it seems to "hang" every now and then. How we know is we connected the 8 PC's and started tranfering files amoungst the group and it seemed to take a very long time. So we swopped the switch and put a Planet 8 port unmanaged switch and the d/l took less than half the time. Also during previous lan parties we would get certain ports that would not respond and the people on those ports would lose the server. What can you guys recommend as a decent, stable, long lasting 8/16 port switch. Will it make any differance if we had a managed switch? (what is the differance). Would it help if the server had a gigabit NIC and the switch a gig port?? We sometime d/l files while playing.

 

[McDouglas]

First of all, it is wery wery rare for a switch to go wrong. Its only built up from electronic components, and those wery unlikely to fail. The only thing can damage it some impact coming from outside, like over voltage (lightning, etc) or psychical damage. Some more advanced devices can fail if they got over heated due to ventillation failure (dust, or ventillator failure), but thats probably not the case with that simple device.
The transfer speed dont depends only on the switch, there are more factors to take account. For example the PC's connecting to it, their OS and setup. If the old switch only supported half-duplex transfer and the new one supported the full-duplex then that could significantly decrease the transfer time. But dont forget about the broadcast data, that could also slow down the transfer between two other (since the switches only separate the colission domain, not the broadcast domain), altough it is wery unlikely on a small lan to generate so much broadcast transfer (but paired up with half-duplex setup, it can cause quite big impact on the networks performance).
What can cause some problems, is hardware incompatibility. Some network cards simply wont work well with the switch, and may cause it to work slower on all port. So if a new PC with such a NIC have been connected to the network, that could be the reason also.

On the secound part of your question, well you can chose almost any of the switches from the SOHO(small office, home office) category, they will give u the same performance, the only diff is maybe in the exterior (design, rubber stands, leds, etc). And choosing a $500 Cisco switch isnt a good idea for you, since its features would be way to useless for your little (little=under 100 nods) network.
With managged switch (altough in SOHO category its wery rare), you can check the trafic usage, you can set up MAC address limitations, etc (sorry, i worked only with big cisco switch, cant realy talk about the features available in the small ones), so not realy necessery for a "lan-party" setup ).
Gigabit NICs (or integrated ones) arent rare nowdays, but with them, there are a few problems. The switches with Gigabit uplink are still costs a lot (compared to SOHO category). The other problem is feeding this connection with data. An good IDE hard drive is capable of about 15-25mb/sec transfer rate in sequential read. 1 gigabit is ~100 megabyte/sec. Its wery unlikely to have a SCSI-UW3 client, who could suck up this speed, so probably 10 client will utilise this speed. And if there is 10 different file request from the server, the HDD have to read randomly and the random read speed is about 5mb/sec. Even if you have multiple hdds in the server, when only one hdd is accessed, the performance will drop. Solution is to use RAID blocks built from SCSI drives, but thats probably wouldnt fit your budget ) You can make stripping raid from IDE drives also, but if a drive fail (and IDE hdds usualy DO fail)... well, you better have a backup
So, i wouldnt suggest investing in gigabit you could utilise it in wery low percent, and for that the costs are too high.

Chose a switch which is able to provide full-duplex transfer, and have enough port for now, and for tomorrow also, and if it has cool design... well, thats your switch

 

[Habitat]

Thanks a lot for the reply that makes a lot of sense. However I still have a problem with the switch and I lent it out to some guys from the LAN party and the only thing that I can think happened is a power / lightning surge. I will ask them, as you say overheating is very unlikely. We found if we put a fan on the switch it seem to "hang" less. The Alfa is supposed to be full duplex, maybe some NIC in the group does not work well with it.
Thanks for your help