# Whats a Good Gigabit Network switch for 5 power users



## Duekay (Jan 24, 2012)

Hi Guys,

I am moving into a place with two other music producers and our GF's at the moment i have a server with a Netgear WNDR3700v2 router connecting my DAW, TV, Xbox and Laptop together.

In the new house with all of us in we will have:
4x DAW (3 small setups and one mega rig)
3x Laptops
1 Wii
1 Xbox
1 HTPC

We want there to be a supper fast connection between the server and the super mega DAW rig as the server will have a sample library that will run off 4 raided SSD running at around 700MB/s (old first gen Corsair SSD's), it would be good to access this from the other 3 DAW's but does not need the same bandwidth (so gigabit would be fine).

So what i was thinking was to have my Router pluged in to the server for the wireless things like the laptops, Wii, Xbox & the HTPC and then having another 8 port switch (fast Backplane) connecting the Hard wired items or something like that?

any ideas would be awesome


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## Mussels (Jan 24, 2012)

uhhh... gigabit can only do 125MB/s theoretically, so there is no way you're going to get the performance you want from a 700MB/s RAID array.


short of going some really, really high end networking equipment you're not going to get anything beyond 100MB/s per system (so that server is going to manage roughly 100MB/s total, not to each client machine getting files off it)

edit: re-read and saw that you dont want all that bandwidth from other machines, but the advice still stands. even basic home consumer switches can manage 100MB/s sustained these days, its just that i'm unsure what your actual needs are here.


and whats a DAW?


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## INSTG8R (Jan 24, 2012)

Mussels said:


> and whats a DAW?



Digital Audio Workstation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_audio_workstation


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## Mussels (Jan 24, 2012)

ok so how much bandwidth do you need? how many systems are going to need to use that server at the same time over the network? do all the systems need to be on the same network (you could put two gigabit cards in the server and have two seperate 1Gb networks, for example)


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## Duekay (Jan 24, 2012)

Mussels said:


> ok so how much bandwidth do you need? how many systems are going to need to use that server at the same time over the network? do all the systems need to be on the same network (you could put two gigabit cards in the server and have two seperate 1Gb networks, for example)



I don't think more than 4-5 devices would be running at a time off the network and probably only 3 of them would be using the the servers file system, so would i need a new switch to handle this or would my router be able to handle that?

Yea the direct line might be an option because my Server setup will be my current GA-EX58-UD5 board that i am using in my DAW atm (i am going to do a swap around this year, DAW will Be the Server, Server will be the HTPC and i am buy a new x79 rig to replace my current DAW), That board has 2x Gigabit ports built in also so wouldn't be a big deal.... Hell if i had the money up my sleeve i would put a 10Gbps fiber card in each of them .

I also Heard this year that Thunderbolt will be released for other manufactures other than apple, what would that be an option if its true? would be more cost effective than fiber.


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## brandonwh64 (Jan 24, 2012)

A standard unmanaged gigabit switch will work.


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## Mussels (Jan 24, 2012)

yeah i dont think you're going to be hammering it very hard, so a basic switch should do the trick.


if your router has gigabit ports then yes you could let it do it, but otherwise no, get a switch.


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## Duekay (Jan 25, 2012)

Mussels said:


> yeah i dont think you're going to be hammering it very hard, so a basic switch should do the trick.
> 
> 
> if your router has gigabit ports then yes you could let it do it, but otherwise no, get a switch.



There would be TV shows streaming from it almost all the time (Our missus like watching TV lol), i am not sure how that works Though, when you play an AVI over a network to say a laptop or HTPC does it buff/load segments into the ram or plays directly from the network location or does it load the full movie into the ram?

the biggest thing for me is not sacrifice any speed for the main DAW to the server, So what i am thinking as a cheap way to solve the issue is just connect the main DAW directly to one of the gigabit ports on the server and the other one connects to my gigabit router that allows  access to the other DAW's (Wired), Laptops, Consoles & HTPC (Wireless).

This is till i can afford a couple of grand for fibers cards and switch's lol


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## Mussels (Jan 25, 2012)

media playback buffers as it goes, but the amount used is fairly low. even 720p media playback doesnt use 5MB/s


and yes, your direct link method is a good way to ensure a dedicated, solid performing connection


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## FordGT90Concept (Jan 25, 2012)

I have the Netgear GS108 and it has been awesome (nice and coal compared to the SMC device it replaced).  GS105 is its 5-port brother.


My Dish Network DVR can handle recording 4 1080i streams and playing back 2 1080i streams simutaneously on a POS WD drive.  It sounds like they use more bandwidth than they actually do.


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## Radical_Edward (Jan 26, 2012)

These work well, we have been selling them at work and haven't had one fail yet. 

ZyXEL GS108B 8 Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch with M...


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## Hunt3r (Jan 26, 2012)

ZyXEL is best the netgear talking in Gb?


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