With the advent of cheaper and cheaper PCs, and the speed at which new technology comes into the computer world, most homes have more than one PC. Some homes deal with a PC for the kids, a PC for the parents, as well as a Laptop or two from the office on the weekends. With more than one PC in the home, file sharing become a very difficult thing to accomplish. The only way to transfer files across any PC is of course the super small capacity 1.38MB Floppy disk. Sharing any file larger than 1.38MBs is a difficult task. In comes home networking. With the PC Mechanic Build your own Network Tutorial, it’s very easy to build your own network. Although we show you how to do it in the tutorial, we neglect to tell you about the different components you can purchase in order to create your home network.

At the center of all 10/100/TX networks with more than 2 PCs is a Hub or a switch. The most basic of the two is a Hub. It simply takes info it receives on one line, and broadcasts it on all other lines plugged into it. A switch is much more advanced. When it receives information, it looks where the information is going. It then looks at it’s own internal table of MAC addresses, which are hardware address (similar to IP address) that are unique for each network card made. If it finds that the information is bound to an address in it’s MAC table, it send that information only two the computer it’s going to, reducing traffic on all other lines. All of it happens within fractions of fractions of a second. This allows for an infinite number of computer pairs sending data over the same switch, unlike a hub that only allows one pair of computers to be transmitting data back and forth at the same time.

Price
Switches are usually of a much higher quality than hubs, and therefore they are much more expensive. CNet switches only adhere to one of those rules; they are high quality. While both the Linksys EtherFast 10/100 8 port Switch, as well as the CNet CNSH-800 Switch both retail for US$89.99 in Tiger Direct’s Product catalog, The CNet 16 and 24 Port Switches (CNSH-1600 and CNSH-2400) cost $249.99 and $399.99 respectively, while the Linksys EtherFast alternatives cost $419.99 and $529.99. Purchasing a CNet switch over a Linksys switch can have a savings of well over $100.

Technical
Switches double as a Broadband router, so long as your as your ISP doesn’t disable such devices attached to your Cable Modem.

Aside from allowing multiple communications to take place, this CNet switch is slightly faster a normal 4 port hub as a comparison, We tested the CNet 8 Port Switch to find out just how much faster it was. No other hub activity was taking place during the file copies. Below are listed the average times for a file transfer of 8.12 MB (8,523,123 bytes) to take place. 10Mbps speeds were used through-out the test for compatibility with the Hub used for testing. The hub used was a Netgear EN104TP standard 4 port switch.

As you can tell, using a switch not only allows for a heavy load of Ethernet communication to take place, it also is marginally faster than a normal Hub. A switch is great for a busy office network, and is a must for any network with more than 50 PCs and a file server, or a server of some sort. You can tell from the times of the Laptop Vs. that of the workstation that these switchs supports Full-Duplex, theoretically making 10Mbps 20Mbps and 100Mbps 200Mbps by allowing data to be sent and recived at the same time. The Laptop’s NIC does not support such a feature, while the Server and Workstation does.

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