Daisy chain switches or bash a hole in my wall?

[bdunosk]

My house is wired with CAT6 from the basement where the cable model feeds an 8-port unmanaged switch that distributes out to the rest of the house. I only have one line running to my office, which has 2 computers. The hole through which the wire is fed from the basement into the office is impossibly small and hard to access from below... before I pound a hole in my office to try to feed the wire from above, how bad would it be to just put another switch in my office to hard wire the 2 computers in there?

Thanks in advance.

 

[seepy83]

Put the hammer down. Adding a switch is perfectly acceptable.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Second switch, in high performance networks you should try to minimize doing so, but I doubt its going to make any perceptable difference

 

[lif_andi]

Might get additional latency... like 2 ms or so 😀

 

[Red Squirrel]

I typically like to have all home runs, but in your case putting a switch is acceptable. Just make sure you put it on a UPS or that segment of the network will go down immediately if the power goes out.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Switch will work for your needs.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Might get additional latency... like 2 ms or so 😀

With no routing taking place, this is unlikely. Its going to be sub 1ms

 

[FrankSchwab]

Unless the two machines are in use simultaneously, pounding bits out to different machines at full line rate, you'll see (and be able to measure) precisely zero difference between having a second switch, and having two lines to the first switch.

Get a second $20 gigabit switch, and call it a day.

 

[bdunosk]

The switch arrived and is installed, as you all said there is no noticeable ill effects. Thanks for saving my wall undue harm and hours of frustration. 🙂

 

[azazel1024]

Might get additional latency... like 2 ms or so 😀

Not even. Store and forward on fast ethernet is roughly 120us, unless there is something badly wrong with the switch. If it is gigabit, its 12us. That's how much time it takes for a packet to get transmitted fully to the switch and stored and then kicked on by the switch.

So unless something is going badly wrong, you are talking sub milisecone latency from an added switch. It should only really be an issue for

1) Added electrical bill costs, but a simple fast ethernet or even gigabit 5 port switch probably uses 1-3w of power with only 2 ports up and working.

2) You need fat pipes, but if all you are doing is running both machines to the basement switch out ot the internet, not a concern, as they are sharing the same final pipe anyway. It may only be an issue if, for instance, you had a server + internet and one machine was hammering the server, that could limit the throughput possible to the internet for the other machines or vice versa (or both are limited to a small degree).

No matter, you aren't likely to be looking at a real limitation for most people's network designs.