Member Avatar for mcoliver88

Hi All,

I currently have a a netgear R6300 as my router on my network, which has 4 Gigbit ethernet ports. I am moving a lot of my devices over to wired connection, as I stream a lot of data via Plex from my server.

I want to increase the amount of ethernet ports that I have, but I know that If i use a switch, that I am going to hit a bottle neck. What would be the best alternative to get additional ethernet ports?

Thanks
Michael

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Building on the thread: a cheap unmanaged gig switch is the lowest-effort way to add ports, but if you want to avoid any chance of an uplink becoming a long‑term constraint there are three practical upgrade paths with different costs and benefits.

Use link aggregation (LACP) between the server and a switch when you need more than one gigabit of throughput or want redundancy. LACP bundles multiple physical ports into one logical link, but both ends must support it and the LAG must be configured identically on each device — it’s a switch/server feature, not magic in the cabling. Check your router/switch manual before assuming LACP is available. (cisco.com)

Buy a multi‑gig or 10Gb switch if you want true single‑link headroom. Today there are affordable 2.5Gb/5Gb/10Gb desktop and rack switches that plug into existing Cat5e/Cat6 runs and give immediate throughput gains for NAS/servers and Wi‑Fi 6/7 APs; this is the cleanest “future‑proof” option if budget allows. (tp-link.com)

Measure and decide before buying: test real wire throughput with iperf3 (server on the media server, client on a PC) and check Plex to see whether streams are direct‑play or being transcoded (transcoding is CPU‑ and sometimes disk‑bound). Example quick test:

# on server
iperf3 -s

# on client (60s, 4 parallel streams)
iperf3 -c SERVER_IP -t 60 -P 4

If iperf shows ~900+ Mbps per wire, a single gig uplink is fine; if you see sustained saturation and you have many simultaneous viewers, consider aggregation or multi‑gig. (iperf.fr)

Practical tip: plug the Plex server into the fastest port available on the switch, keep the router as the uplink to the Internet, and only buy a managed switch if you specifically need LACP, VLANs, QoS or SNMP.

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Member Avatar for rproffitt

To avoid that, run only one gigabit link from the router to your new gigabit switched hub and place all your wired gear on the new switched hub. As to the "best" that's a tough question with so many models available across the world plus you didn't give a count of the total connections you need.

Maybe a Netgear GS108-400NAS or it's lineup is OK? Here that's 40 bucks or 5 bucks a port. As how a switched hub works is on the web I press pause here.

Member Avatar for mcoliver88

Thanks for your reply. When I mean "Best" I meant the best solution rather than best product. Im thinking using a switch is not neccesarly the best idea as I will have bottleneck, as data will travel down that single cable at one frame at a time. Which could pose a problem for devices that are streaming 1080p films. Im looking at 8 - 16 ethernet ports, as Im thinking of future proofing myself.

Thanks :)

Member Avatar for rproffitt

That's why I didn't use the router's Ethernet ports for other devices. The internet link is rarely enough to cause any concern about your "data will travel" over a single cable. The internet is what speed? In fact I've kicked up router speeds for over a decade with this trick. Don't use the hub in the router (except for the link to the much faster switched hub.)

There are 16 port versions of the Netgear I noted. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122139 was 85 bucks with good reviews.

I've done this so again I'll press pause.

Member Avatar for CimmerianX

You can take 1 port off your wifi router and cascade any switch to that port.
You don't need a smart switch for this, any unmanaged switch will do fine. SMC EZ switches are cheap and work well.

Don't worry about bottlenecks. To stream a 1080p movie is about 6-10 Mb/s. if you get a Gigabit switch, you could stream 1080p movies to over 50 devices before your single gig port becomes the bottleneck (a little exagerative, but you get the point).

The bottleneck will occur at the disk on the plex server as the read speed of the data is probably far below this number.

So, go get yourself an unmanaged gig switch and cascade it off your router and you are good to go.

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