remodeling & runnin the cat5. need networking

[scotoma]

Doing some remodeling and running new cable, telephone, and ethernet cable (8 wire). I ran the wires from each room in the house to come to a centralized point in the garage. I want a gigabit LAN to share large files and stream movies etc? Before I go too much further I have a couple questions about hardware etc? Here is what I am thinking:

Modem -> Wireless router (for the laptop in the house) -> Gigabit Switch -> Rest of the house PCs

Question:
Will this setup work and allow me to utilize the gigabit speeds on the LAN wile keeping the Wireless ability or will plugging in the router to the switch drop the speed to 10/100?

 

[Rapidskies]

Just the port from the switch to the router will run at 10/100mb while all the other devices on your lan (that support Gigabit)will run at Gigabit speeds. The speed is port specific provided you have an autosensing switch.

 

[JackMDS]

As long as all the components are Giga and are plugged to a Giga Switch it will Run Giga Jr. (The router is 10/100 make sure that it is plugged to the Giga Switch but do not use the Routers other ports for Giga components,

Why I called it Giga Jr?

At the moment Giga is of Value while installed in Busy Networks that run server software and high level hardware that is already tuned to use Giga efficiently.

In contrast to the 1000% improvement that you would expect. Putting Giga into a regular small network would result in 25% - 50% improvement at best.

By next year when Longhorn (Windows 2005/6) will come out, entry level system would be capable to benefit more from the Giga.

However if you are not stressed by the extra expense it is a very "Cool", Geek "Social Advantage" to be able to say: "Hey, I have Gigabit Network".

The Giga transfer will be about 25% to 50% more than 100Mb/sec. connection.

 

[adlep]

Originally posted by: JackMDS

The Giga transfer will be about 25% to 50% more than 100Mb/sec. connection.

It is still a quite hefty improvement if you ask me

 

[JackMDS]

Like every thing else in life it depends.

If you spend hours every day on transferring files and using Giga cuts the time by half (50%), sure it worth while.

If you are doing mainly Internet, and casual File Transfer you basically save ?nothing?.

Better wait, by the end of the year there will be more choices of Entry Level Giga, and the capability to price ratio will be much better.

 

[Cheetah8799]

Will this setup work and allow me to utilize the gigabit speeds on the LAN wile keeping the Wireless ability or will plugging in the router to the switch drop the speed to 10/100?

Yes, it'll work as you described. As other suggested though, you probably won't see the actual "gigabit" transfer speeds that are advertised. You'd have to test by copying some HUGE files across your network from one fast system to another to see what happens. The hard drives in the machines will probably be slower than the theoretical network gigabit speeds....

 

[scotoma]

You guys are awesome. Thanks for the knowledge.