Network hub vs. switch?

[jamrock]

Switches are faster so all things being equal, a switch should result in faster throughput.

It may be more important to review the type of data that is being sent and the nature of the existing bottlenecks.

If people are surfing the web, the speed of the internet connection may be the real bottleneck. Speeding up data transfer on the LAN will not make a difference if the hub is currently transferring data more quickly than the ADSL connection.

I have even seen where the real bottleneck was the 10 MPS network cards that had been purchased x years ago.

[Nemesis G4]

It is good to note that a hub and a swith does basically the same job. What you must consider is the use thereof. For instance, if you are sharing a ADSL connection across a couple of computers, there won't be much of a difference whether you use a hub or switch as the computers are all fighting for access to one port i.e the one with the active ADSL connection. But if it is a case where there are more than one resource to be accessed, for instance a printer, a shared folder on another machine and internet connection, then different users will require different resources at any one time. This is where the switch would prove to be more usefull than the hub.

Just a thought in making a better choice.

[matronyx]

Hub
10/100 Ethernet Hubs are only half duplex - each client can only send OR receive data at a particular time.
Total network bandwidth is limited to the speed of the hub, i.e. a 10Base-T hub provides 10Mb bandwidth max, no matter how many ports it has. Bandwidth is also shared between the connected PCs.

Switch
A switch has multiple broadcast domains and can be 10/100/1000mbs.
They operate at full duplex allowing your computers to send and receive at the same time.
It is intellegent in that it looks at the mac address contained in the header of the packet. It is able to build and retain a mac address table so that it can send the packet to exactly the correct port and not all the ports. This is what makes it faster then a hub.

[Spawn]

[quote author=matronyx link=board=26;threadid=25;start=15#msg11109 date=1057854301]
Hub
10/100 Ethernet Hubs are only half duplex - each client can only send OR receive data at a particular time.
Total network bandwidth is limited to the speed of the hub, i.e. a 10Base-T hub provides 10Mb bandwidth max, no matter how many ports it has. Bandwidth is also shared between the connected PCs.
[/quote]

Just to add, if a hub and a switch is broadcasting information at 10mbs, the hub will appear to be much slower because unlike switch is intellegent enough to know which network device to talk to, the hub talks to every device in the network until it gets a response but then as a result, there are a lot of collisions and therefore the hub retransmits info until that particular device responds and during this retranmission of data, time is wasted.