Unmanaged v smart switch speed

[ChrisInOz]

Are smart switches (ie Netgear GS108T) faster than unmanaged switches? I have a Linsys SD2008 Gigabit switch that I am thinking of replacing with the abovementioned Netgear smart switch to increase my network speed. The network runs 4 gigabit-capable computers and a NAS. Please excuse my ignorance, I am newish to networking.

 

[onnoossendrijver]

No, a smart switch will not increase your network speed.
Probably your NAS is the bottleneck. Most NAS devices have a relatively slow CPU and can not fill a gigabit connection.

 

[00Roush]

Basically onnoossendrijver is right but the GS108T does support link aggregation which can in some cases increase network speed. This basically allows you to combine two or more network ports to act as one connection. So this is one case where a smart switch can be faster than most unmanaged switches.

In normal setups though unmanaged switches provide the same throughput as a smart switch.

If you seeing slow file transfer speeds give us some more info about the problem and we might be able to help.

00Roush

 

[ChrisInOz]

Thanks onnoossendrijver & 00Roush for your replies. I suspected that was the case but wanted to be certain before purchasing (or not purchasing) the Netgear. I have a ReadyNAS Duo with twin Seagate 7200.11 500Gb drives in RAID1 mode. It's connected through a Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switch to an E8600 Core2 Duo based system with 4Gb RAM. I am using the onboard network chip (Realtek 8111B) on a Gigabyte MB. I've tried both Jumbo frames and normal (if that's what you call it) and they perform roughly the same speed, ~35Mbyte/s (using Netmeter) transfer speed from the NAS to my system hard drive. Between computers I get ~45Mbyte/s speed. This is based on transferring a 7Gb file. Are these speeds reasonable? I'm a bit of a newb to tweaking networks, usually just hooking them up and using the defaults, but a lot of my work these days involves accessing large files from the NAS, so I'd like to make sure the setup is running optimally.