E4200 Ethernet Bandwidth [ Edited ]

[Susquatch]

I previously posted this topic in the "Other" category because its mostly about switches and the whole switch category has been archived, but got no response.  But the subject is also about my new router, so I'm re-posting it here in the hopes that someone in this forum group can answer my question.

I have a Gigabit E4200 Router, two SE2800 Gb Switchs, and several older 100Mb Linksys Switches.  If I keep the old switches and use them for low speed devices (printers and a few old PCs) and mix 100Mb and Gigabit switches and devices on my network, what happens to the overall speed of the network?  Does it drop to the highest common denominator (100 Mb) of the output connections on the E4200 router, or will the router simply serve each device and/or switch on each of its ports whatever bandwidth they each can handle?  It would be great if my NAS Gb units could run at full gigabit speed for transferring files between Gigabit enabled devices.

If there is an issue, can anyone recommend a wiring strategy to minimize the problem?  For example, I would be willing to purchase an SE2500 five port Gigabit switch and dedicate it to serve all the lower speed switches and their connected devices so everything on the upstream side of the dedicated switch would be Gigabit, and all the 100Gb stuff would be on the downstream side.

Cheers!

[gv]

Maximum speed is the maximum speed on the path between the sender and the receiver, with some potential penalty for the path from a faster sender to a slower receiver (as the faster sender may saturate the slower link easily thus causing frame loss on the connecting switch).

[Susquatch]

Call me stupid.  I think what you said can be translated as follows:

If the router is connected to four devices and two of them are Gb Etehrnet and two are 100Mb, It will let the two Gb devices talk to each other at GB speeds, and it will talk to the 100Mb device at 100 Mb.  The Router does not slow down all of its ports to 100Mb just because there is a 100Mb device connected to one of its ports. But it can't talk to all four ports at once at their full speed. The Gb data transfers will steal most of the bandwidth forcing some repeated data transfers due to frame loss on the slower 100Mb connections.

Is that more or less correct?

Cheers!

[gv]

Yes. That's almost correct. For a single you should not even see frame loss with a FastEthernet device on the same switch as flow control in the switch should take care of this. Otherwise it's correct.

[smitty870]

I always thought you were as slow as the slowest point no matter at what point your connected?

[sabretooth]

100Mb/sec slow.... that's funny.

[gv]

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@smitty870 wrote:

I always thought you were as slow as the slowest point no matter at what point your connected?

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That's what I wrote: it's basically "as slow as the slowest point" on the path of your data connection with some slight additional slowdown in cases where it's possible for a fast sender to flood the slower link on the path...