Hi Everyone,

I'm planning to redo the whole network at home soon. Currently we have a mix of different cat5(e) cables and an old switch.

The main router from my ISP has a cable to a 8port switch which has cables running to all devices in the home (pc's, tv's, NAS etc). Since it's kinda slow at 100mbit I am looking for an upgrade.

I'm going to order 50M cat6 UTP cables with a load of cat6 connectors so we can achieve 1gbit inside the house.

Now the next quest for me is to look for a switch that's up for the task, since everything goes via that. All 8 ports on the old witch are used, so anything above that (16 ports) would be great. We do quite a lot of file sharing, and movie streaming from the NAS to mediaplayers and TV's inside the home, so the switch should be able to manage that without bogging down the whole network.

Is anyone here a bit more 'home' in this kind of hardware? I think I should avoid anything dirt cheap, but that's where my knowledge ends.

What I've found so far:

Netgear Prosafe GS116GE
TP-Link TL-SG3216
D-link DGS-1016A

Don't know if they're good, so any help is welcome.

Thanks in advance.

cat5 cables can do gbit speeds no problem, you can save a bit of money on that end (running 20m cat5 cables through half of the flat here and getting the full gbit on the network). Unless you plan to future prove and go for a 10gbit network any time soon.

I only have like one or two cables that are 5e I believe. 50m cat6 is only 20 euro. And since I want to do it 'right' this time, I'm not going to save on that.

I get the impression that it doesn't matter that much what switch I take, the specs seem the same;

• 8k mac address table
  
• 9k jumbo frames
  
• 32Gbps bandwidth
  

Not sure if a(n) (un)managed switch matters or not...

Not very helpful, but I have a cheap TP-Link 8-port gigabit switch with 7 devices plugged in using CAT5 cables and get the expected crazy network speeds (~110 MB/s from my laptop to my desktop).

Don't expect your NAS to be much faster though - my Synology DS212J can only do 40-60 MB/s over the network.

Well, that speed would still be better than my current speeds across the network (10-12 MB/s).

Little off-topic: have you noticed any performance improvements with DSM 4.2 running? I've heard it should be faster. Not sure if that applies to the DS212J too though.

Quote from Bose321 :

Little off-topic: have you noticed any performance improvements with DSM 4.2 running? I've heard it should be faster. Not sure if that applies to the DS212J too though.

Not really - it says it supports some new SMB file transfer protocol which should make it better but I think realistically the hardware specs are the limiting factor.

Quote from troy :

cat5 cables can do gbit speeds no problem, you can save a bit of money on that end

Sure it can, the biggest difference between cat5e and 6 is the shielding against interference and cross-talk.
So while cat5e is enough for 1gbit - cat6 is still the better deal when it comes to reliable networkspeeds when/if you have 1 or more other cables close to the tp..