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Which do I need? A network hub or a network switch?

H

Habibrobert

Junior Member
Hi everyone,

I am running a cat 5 cable from my router into a room where there is a network printer as well as my desktop. The network printer uses a wired print server so I will need one connection for that, and I would also like to connect my computer via cat 5 cable as well. I am not sure how do to about this as this is my first experience in networking, if you can even call this that.

I have heard of network hubs and switches which allow you to have one ethernet source to connect to multiple devices. I am not sure if these two devices would help me create some type of a hub, where I can split the original cat 5 signal into two, so I may hook up my printer and desktop to the network. Is this possible? If so, which of the two devices will do the job the best?

One last question, how will this affect my band width? Since I am splitting the signal, doesn't that mean that the bandwidth will decrease?

Thanks very much.
 
There is almost no reason to use a hub these days, in simple terms switches do the same job as a hub but they do it better. A hub is like a splitter where each device is getting all the traffic and only one device can talk at a time. A switch is smart and only sends data to the device it was intended for and can have multiple conversations at once with various devices.

In your case what I would do is just run multiple cat6 cables so you don't need a switch. I'm not a fan of having network equipment outside of the server/network room.

As far as bandwidth, with a switch you'll have 1gb of bandwidth going to your main switch, if you run two cables than both devices will have 1gb. 1gb is a lot of bandwidth so unless you transfer tons of data between multiple devices at once all the time you probably wont notice any difference.

If you're talking about internet bandwidth, it wont matter, since your internet is a much bigger bottleneck than your home network. Printers also don't use much bandwidth so not really any worries there either. You can have 100 devices on one network but if they're not doing much they arn't using much bandwidth.
 
You won't even find a hub being sold anymore. Switches are more efficient by breaking up the network collision domains.

Buy a gigabit switch, profit.
 
ch33zw1z said:
You won't even find a hub being sold anymore. Switches are more efficient by breaking up the network collision domains.

Buy a gigabit switch, profit.
Click to expand...

That was my first question. I think the last time I saw a consumer grade hub on a shelf in a retail store was the 90s. I guess maybe if you looked real hard on the internet you could still find one 😀
 
Then its settled! A switch it is! Thanks for the help guys. Can anyone recommend a particularly good switch? Also, is there a limit to how many switches you can use in a given network?

Thanks.
 
hubs are getting so rare these days that collisions arent even talked about in wired networking anymore really, unless you're dealing with old systems.
 
Habibrobert said:
Then its settled! A switch it is! Thanks for the help guys. Can anyone recommend a particularly good switch? Also, is there a limit to how many switches you can use in a given network?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

My brother, some friends, and people on this forum have been liking Trendnet gigabit switches:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833156251

In term of how many switches. There's not really a limit that I know of. Each switch port is it's own collision domain, which is one of the big differences between a hub and a switch. With Hubs, ethernet best practices were a "5-4-3" rule, which had to do with collision domains.

How many switches do you need? How many devices on the network? what does the physical topology look like (iow, where's the devices located related to the switch, and where are the switches located relative to each other)?
 
lol at college we found a 2U managed hub. Yes, rackmountable managed hub. I don't really know what you'd manage on a hub, but it had a serial console port, lots of lights and if I recall it even had a VGA port. Serious business.

Now you're probably thinking this must have been like 48 ports or something. Nope, 8 ports. LOL
 
The truth is you can use either, for all of 2 devices, the advantage of switched over hubs is they know whats going on and they use that to prevent packet collision, with all of 2 devices, you really do not need to worry about packet collision.

The other half is hubs are not common anymore so you'll be lucky if you can find a hub that is not just old and runs 10 Mb/s but today's ethernet runs 1 Gb/s, so if you intend to transfer things between you LAN the switch will be faster assuming your devices can handle that speed.

If you have an old hub lying around you can use it, but you may be better off buying a switch, if you are shopping anyway, buy a new switch and use that.
 
Hubs? lulz.. people still use these? lol..

I think given modern TCP/IP nodes, a separate collision domain is needed.
 
ch33zw1z said:
the one's with BNC connectors are contagious.
Click to expand...

uh-oh. we have some of them in our storage room from an old upgrade. One is still, for some unknown reason, up in the celling with a light bulb and switch there to make viewing easer. We treat that like asbestos and stay away from it.

I still find their tentacles left hanging around now and then when i'm running cable. Our next recycling clean out, they're taking a trip. I'll be sure to wear some hazmat gear.
 
I don't think you can find hubs nowadays .. they are piece of history.

When you get a switch, make sure it's with "Auto Crossover" functionality .. when connecting two similar devices (e.g. Switch to Switch), you need cross cable, when connecting different devices (e.g. Switch to PC), you need straight cable.
If you get Auto Crossover switch, you don't need to worry about which kind of cable you use, the crossing (when required) will be done at the swtich level.
 
you can get an old crappy switch cheap. like a 24 or 48 port gigabit with 4 10gbe for like $300 - these can do port mirroring if you need to sniff traffic.

even cheaper if you need less features or can deal with web-managed.

i dig the $19 rosewill 8-port gigabit but they aren't really configurable and flow control can be a pita to disable (if even possible)
 
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