VanLUG Email Archive
Dale McGladdery (dmcgladdery@City.North-Van.bc.ca)
Tue, 22 Feb 2000 09:57:51 -0800
> the auto-sensing is clearly a benefit, if it is so, however i have been
> told that switches are slower than hubs when it comes to heavy data
> transfer, such as might occur while doing video editing. do you know if
The switches I've seen use a feature called "cut through". The front of the
packet begins leaving the switch before the end of the packet is completely
received, reducing latency. It may be that lower end switches don't have
this feature.
As stated previously, switches are more network friendly. (They also limit
packet sniffing, if security is an issue.) In the "bake off" tests I've seen
published for "the big guys" (Bay (Nortel)/Cisco/3Com etc.), all the
switches were able to keep up to full load at 100 megabit/sec. on multiple
ports. Again, this might not be true of the low end switches.
I'm not sure what kind of video network you're trying to assemble. In an
earlier post you mentioned near broadcast quality. If you're doing real time
video, you'll have some quality of service issues to deal with. If it's a
streaming media app, you might want to consider multicast support. You also
might want to consider a managed hub or switch. It would take work to
implement but you'd get stat's on how your network was doing. (e.g., if you
were losing packets you'd be able to isolate the problem faster.) All this
said, if you're just prototyping in a "lab" environment the added features
wouldn't matter at this point.
. . . Dale
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