Guys I'm looking at buying a gigabit switch for my test lab here at home. Do any of you have any ideas on what I should purchase? Also what should one be looking for for when buying a gig switch I always hear people speak of jumbo frames, and buffer sizes can you use your existing cat5 cable? I heard one guy saying that you needed cat 6.

the market for gigabit switches is pretty wide, totally depends what you want out of it. if you're looking for managed switches, then you're looking at a non-trivial cost for a Cisco catalyst or similar ($2000 at the low end). at the total other end of the market somethign cheap from linksys / netgear will do unmanaged stuff for a fraction of the cost ($100 could get you something i assume).

and cat5e cabling is fine, no need for cat6

I'm just buying it for my home test lab which is about 10 systems. However I move a good amount of data so I don't want a garbage switch. So whats the dell with the buffer size and Jumbo frames?

no deal as far as i can tell. but again it's down to what kind of switch you want. is your lab for testing netwroks or testing servers?

Jumbo Frames allows for much, much larger Ethernet frames than are normally allowable. They have to be supported by the OS, the NIC, and the switch from what I recall. I can't remember what happens in a mixed environment. I think it's part of your MSS value so it should be able to interoperate fine (this is all from faulty recollection, take with a grain of salt).

I would check eBay and see if you can find anything from HP, it will probably be cheaper than Cisco gear and the quality is just as good. Dell also offers rebranded switches (including some models with management), but the feedback I have heard on them is "not so good".

I will do that I just bought a hp l3 switch for work and its great.
However since this will be in my home I will be looking for a switch that does not have a to of fans they give off to much noise.
Also what do you guys think about this article

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lansr...uickview_gs108

The writer states that every device on your lan should be able to handle jumbo frames if not you could have problems. I do not plan on changing out my routers and firewall so how can you tell if your gear can handle jumbo frames? Also should you hard code the frame size on the nic or is auto negoiate fine?