Hi,

Background - I currently have a home network that is pretty much all 100MB/s ethernet.

Question - If I buy a 1GB/s switch (for downstairs) and have 2 of my devices that have 1GB/s network support physically into this switch, can I assume they'll be able to communicate based on 1GB/s ethernet? i.e. even whilst other upstairs devices are only 100MB/s connected to the upstairs 100MB/s switch. In other words I'm checking whether a specific subnet can be running traffic at two rates over it. i.e. so if there were a constraint whether I would need to use a router to create a 100MB/s subnet & a 1GB/s subnet separately, or a v-lan or something??

So config would be roughly:
- router
...switch 1GB/s
......2 x devices with 1GB/s ethernet
...switch 100GB/s (switches connected together)
......rest of home devices

Also there's no special cable for 1GB/s ethernet is there?

thanks

the 3 gig-e devices will talk to each other at gigabit speeds only if connected to each other, yes. Now, the 100mb devices will only operate at 100mb/s.

Something to consider.

Your internet connection will not be gigabit (unless you are forking over mega money), in that case, you'd already have everything at gig speed.

The gigabit switch will sense the gigabit clients, and switch those devices at full speed. The only limitation will be the upstream side (router/DHCP server).

Still, stream video/audio between those gig-e clients to your hearts content.

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thanks - so there wouldn't be any problem with my 1GB device still networking to my 100MB device on the same subnet? i.e. where does the translation/buffering occur between the devices here. In this case the downstairs 1GB PC to upstairs 100MB PC connection would be:

PC(1GB)-Switch(1GB)-Switch(100MB)-PC(100MB)

All on the same subnet.

thanks

Yes, you can still connect to the slower device, albeit at the max speed for the slower device.

__________________
I'm here, you may now make your next two wishes.

Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Use Windows!!

Every Piece of Electronic Equipment runs on a finite amount of smoke. The systems are normally very efficient at reclaiming the smoke and recycling it, however, should you do something to let the smoke out, your system will become useless.

SAVE THE SMOKE !!

New PC :
New: Phenom 9500 Quad 2.2, 4gb ram XP Pro 64-bit (Sata 0), XP Pro 32 bit (sata 1), 40 eide HDD (music), Pioneer Blu-Ray Burner, HP Multidisk CD-RW/DVD-Rom, 2x250 Seagate HDD's, ATI Radeon 3870, Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe WiFi-AP

Old PC:
P4 1.5GHz, 768 Ram, hda-80Gb (80Ubuntu), DVD R/RW