GOOD Gigabit switch?

[davemar14]

Hi,
I am looking to upgrade my home network to gigabit. All my cabling is CAT5E so I should be OK there. I have been checking around, but I have been unable to find any comparisons and real world benchmarks to show throughput of different switches. I only need an 8 port gigabit switch. I transfer large amounts of data between comps, and use Norton Ghost to backup and restore hard drive images. It is not uncommon to be pushing 7GB files or so around the network. I need something that will offer good throughput. My comps shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck. My one machine has 2x74GB Raptors in RAID 0 setup, and the other has 2x250GB WD SATA300 in RAID 1. I don't want to break the bank, but then again I don't want to buy crap. I have read that in order to get decent performance you need to have jumbo frames on the switch and network cards. I haven't purchased the gigabit cards yet either, so I am looking for some decent cards too. Any recomendations?

My Systems:
http://amdgamingrig.dyndns.org

 

[Madwand]

Most modern switches should be fine. I use a D-Link DGS-1008D and get very good performance. The sibling DGS-1005D can be found for very little. There are numerous others, including the more recent D-Links and Netgear GS608 that support jumbo frames.

The Intel Pro 1000's are generally well-regarded, and can be found for as little as $21 USD. They have good driver support and jumbo frame support.

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=583770/sort_type=price/ut=ce7e5243343a2ecf

You might lose a bit of performance going through PCI instead of native / PCIe if your HD array is fast enough. You would lose even more if you used a HD controller that went through the same PCI bus at the same time.

I'd look forward to your post here:

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/network/Highest-MB-transfer-rate-home-LAN-ftopict21405.html