Need to replace my 8 port hub for home network, as need more ports. Does anyone know the pros and cons of Hubs vs Switches ?

Have Netgear kit now, more than happy to stick with it - any recomendations ?

Hubs simply repeat all incoming packets to all ports. Switches are more intelligent, and they learn which port each MAC address is on, and then only send the packets to the right port. This means that your utilization increases. On a home network, that is usually irrelevant, as the minimal number of computers means that there's not much contention anyway. A side effect of switches is that since they aren't dumb repeaters, they actually electrically work like actual ethernet ports, and that means that you can increase the distances on your network. Again, though, in the home, that probably isn't going to make much difference.

On the other hand, getting a switch isn't all that much more expensive than getting a hub and it has the potential of effectively increasing your in-network bandwidth and allowing greater distances.

On the other other hand, hubs are nice when you're doing network debugging precisely because each port gets all the traffic. If you're trying to snoop some network traffic, a hub makes it easier because your sniffer can be on any port. (Of course, most commercial grade switches are configurable so that you can set a port that broadcasts all the packets precisely for this purpose, but you'd be paying through the nose for that for a home network.)

Buy a Netgear FS108. It's an 8-port 10/100 switch. Just use it with your existing hub (put all the slow kit on the hub).

http://www.microwarehouse.co.uk have them for 40.99UKP ex. VAT which is 10UKP cheaper than I've seen elsewhere.

The FS116 is 16-port and is 70.99UKP.

Essentially, everything Bitt says is correct. He did leave out one detail -- fixed speed hubs only talk at one speed. If you've got a mixture of devices at different speeds, they'll either not work, or go at the slowest speed.

What you might consider is a dual-speed hub, which will allow you to have a mixture of 10Mbps (the empeg) and 100Mbps (your PC) stuff, without everything slowing down to 10Mbps. To oversimplify, a dual-speed hub contains a hub for each speed, with a single 10/100 switched crossover between them.

If one had only one PC and your empeg, then one would use a 10Mbps hub, because they'll be talking at 10Mbps anyway. If one had two PCs and an empeg, then one would use a dual-speed hub, so that the PCs can talk at 100Mbps, but they can talk to the empeg at 10Mbps. The Netgear DS104 and DS108 (depending on how many ports one wants) are ideal for this. You've already got enough gear to overflow one hub, so this doesn't apply to you.

However, as Bitt also says, 10/100 switches aren't much more expensive than 10/100 hubs these days. If you want one of these, I'd recommend a Netgear FS108.

To put things in perspective -- as I mentioned on another thread -- empeg Towers has a mix of DS108 and FS108 stuff. At home I have a pair of FS108 switches.

Mmmm. Pretty blue colour. Flashing lights.

edit: "oversimplify slightly" better get rid of that before Bitt notices

I just noticed something: the time on the messages says: 03:08 PM

Either it's 15:08, or it's 3:08 PM. Bah.

He did leave out one detail -- fixed speed hubs only talk at one speed.

Oops. Very good point.

Thanks All - I think I get it.

I am happy to spend a little extra on a Switch over a hub ( in fact some of the switches appear cheaper than Hub's for some reason ?? ), as

a) have two long runs of cable down to the garage servers, that I notice a speed issue with ( this may be a bad cable or low spec PC's though )

b) I could do with the speed when moving loads of MP3's ( to Empeg etc ) and I have a large collection of videos that I need to stream to the TV PC.

Guess I missed something on the speed front though, I already have the Netgear 8 port Hub mentioned, as Dell Receivers and Empeg's need 10mbit. But does a Switch work the same way as a Hub in that it does NOT reduce the speed down to 10mbit for two 100mbit devices that are file sharing etc.

Almost all switches these days can operate each port at either 10Mbps or 100Mbps. I'd see if you could verify that before you buy one, but I seriously doubt that you could find one that doesn't.

There are two more differences that no one seems to have mentioned.

Switches are full duplex while hubs are half duplex. So acks aren't held up by the incoming data stream, as a result the variance in latency is significatnly lower.

Also, switches often allow multiple ports to work at the same time, this could be a feature of the more expensive switches only. For example, a device on port 1 can talk to port 2 at the same time as devices on ports 3 and 4 are transferring data. This is probably not that interesting in a home environment.

I in fact did just this. All the empegs and the LaserWriter 2g (and the TiVo when I reconnect it) live on the hub, which is daisy-chained off the Netgear 10/100 switch I upgraded to about 8 months ago.

(The upgrade was done solely so the only 2 100 devices in the house, my laptop's minipci network and my server, could cram data at each other faster. when they do everything else on the wired network is very sad )