[CS-FSLUG] [OT] USB Hubs; Gigabit Networking

[Tim Young]

There are two parts to a wireless router switch, the wireless, and the 
switch. The wireless component is the one which may limit itself to the 
slowest wireless device on the network.

The wired connections are normal switches, which should give you a solid 
10/100 link. You will need to check the specifications of that router to 
see if it is gigabit capable, but I doubt it will be. Most likely it is 
10/100. BUT, you can still use a gigabit switch and have all the devices 
which are gigabit capable plugged into that. You can then have the 
advantages of gigabit, without most of the limitations. You would have a 
shared link from the gigabit to the wireless switch, (and probably from 
the wireless to the Internet), but that should not cause you too much 
grief. From the Internet out, the link is so much slower than 100mb, and 
your wireless link is even slower yet.

If you were hoping to get decent throughput to something on wireless; 
that will not happen for a while. The 802.11n draft wireless 
specification does claim to go up to 540bps (half of gigibit). This 
specification is still in draft form. If you get something with it, make 
sure it has some way to upgrade the firmware to whatever becomes the 
standard. But even then, wireless has an inherent limitation. It usually 
only goes to half the claimed speed. In the wired world, the issue is 
referred to as "full duplex/half duplex." Basically, half the antenna is 
devoted to sending, the other half to receiving. Some vendors have two 
antennas, one for sending, one for receiving, each one capable of the 
full speed (54mbps). They then claim that this combo makes it 110mbps. 
What it means is that it is possible to send a file at 54mbps, or 
receive a file at 54mbps. The problem is that most internet protocols do 
not split the sending and receiving 50/50. If you were opening a file 
from your nas, not taking into consideration the acknowledgment part of 
protocols, the traffic is basically one way. With the dual-antenna 
system, you will max out at 54mbps, one 20th of gigibit speed.

And that does not take into consideration what happens when there are 
multiple wireless devices on your wireless network. :)

All that to say, wireless is great. Wireless is convenient. I love 
wireless. But wireless will not replace wired for quite a while yet, at 
least for those who have big files on their network.

At my house we do have a fileserver with digitized TV shows. We can 
watch these over our wireless link without much of a problem. But when 
we try to back up our laptops to the fileserver, we always plug into the 
wired network.

Probably more information than you wanted...

- Tim Young

Nathan T. wrote:
> Hey everyone,
>
> I was hoping for some feedback on something. I had two USB hubs that  
> had power supplies, one was an IOGear with integrated card reader and  
> 7 ports, and the other was a smaller Cicero with only 4 ports. I had  
> the Cicero one on top, and just yesterday the IOGear one began  
> getting sketchy. I've been thinking about what might have happened  
> and the only thing that comes to mind is that the Cicero one was hot  
> all over, and the IOGear one was hot on top yesterday, today they  
> were both fairly cool, but the IOGear one had the two USB ports on  
> the front completely dead, and the ports on the back would cut in and  
> out. I fished it out and it's now heading for the garbage, but I  
> suspect it was the other one heating up that killed it. Since then I  
> haven't found the Cicero one getting hot, but I'm thinking of  
> replacing it anyway because USB hubs are fairly cheap now, and I  
> think that was the one overheating. Has anyone had a USB hub get hot  
> enough to do hardware damage before? I must admit this is cause for  
> concern.
>
> I've also got a question, It's been quite in here so I don't see any  
> harm in asking. I was thinking of getting a Gigabit capable NAS. I  
> have Gigabit support in my desktop, and I'd have to check and see if  
> my Mac Mini has it; however, my router is limited to 10/100. I know  
> that with the wireless standards the speed is limited by the slowest  
> device on the network, if I were to use a gigabit switch would the  
> router still cap the speed at 10/100? For those that might have some  
> input to offer, I know D-Link is one of the more problematic brands,  
> but they are also the only company I can find that offers a raid 1  
> capable NAS at a reasonable price, so I'm considering getting a D- 
> Link DNS-323. Does anyone in here use a NAS or that one in  
> particular? I'm currently using a CP Technologies NAS enclosure, and  
> I've found it to be much slower than a USB external Hard drive. The  
> problem is that it's getting too expensive to have external hard  
> drives and I just don't have the physical space. I'd like to be able  
> to get a raid capable NAS enclosure that I can put my existing hard  
> drives into. I don't want to set up a whole computer for this, those  
> things are just too darn expensive, and the DNS-323 is supposed to be  
> easy to rebuilt in case of a disk failure with the newest firmware  
> (which fixes the rebuild problems the previous versions had). What  
> kind of advice might I get here?
>
> Nathan T.
>
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