Connecting 2 switches

[golfcart]

Hi all, I have a quick networking question Is it possible to connect a pair of cables between two switches to double the bandwidth between the two?

connecting two switches will only expand the network, not double the speed.


Jason

[golfcart]

I mean connect them together with 2 cables instead of one. Say I have (2) 16 port switches and don't want a bottleneck between them, can I run a pair of cables between the two and make the link between them faster? I know it won't turn a 100 mbit link into 200 mbit, but will it give me (2) 100 mbit links that will work at the same time?

You're talking about using ports as one-way simplex connections at full speed. I don't believe that it's possible to do with any switch I've ever seen. Not that it isn't, just not with any switch I've ever seen.

[golfcart]

So it won't load balance between the two? Will it damage anything to try it?

[Westy]

There shouldn't be any reason at all why it should do any damage so far as i can see although to load ballance the connection as your suggesting this isn't possible between two switches with out them being made by cisco or some other similar company (your talking mega bucks for what your talking about) although in thorey it SHOULD only give you a singular 100 mbit connection. You may even get a recursive loop of data that'll just overload the switch and send it googar

Hope this helps but don't hold me responsible for anything that goes wrong :P

[golfcart]

Ok I was hoping that wouldn't be the answer Here is another one. Can 3 switches be wired in a triangle topology to speed things up?

[Westy]

you mean a ring topology ? Yes they can but to be honest you won't really notice much performance diffrence as its highly unlikely that you'll ever out grow the 100mbit as a IDE HDD can't utilise the full 100mbit connection. If you tell me exactly what your trying to do i'll give you the best way to set it up if you wish i will need to know exactly what the network will be doing i.e gaming or file sharing and how big are the files, and what connection topology you will be using i.e peer to peer or client server

[golfcart]

I'm just trying to think of a better way to network for our lan parties. Right now we average 12 people, but are planning on growing much larger. The last time we did it, we used two 8 port switches and there was definately a bottleneck between the two. Not so much during the gaming, but as soon as a few people started sharing files between the 2 network segments, thing slowed right down to a crawl.

Basically what I want to do is add more switches as needed without buying anything over 24 port in size and minimize bottlenecking.

[Westy]

right ok

This is nothing unusual, this is due to the fact that the file sharing will consume more bandwidth and in turn proberly has a higher priority over the gaming packets. The best way is to have them all setup on one switch if your budget will strertch that far. another way is to slap the people who are munching the bandwidth and tell them to pack it in and use a cross over cable to transfer files between two machines which is also quicker than using any networking device