Baystack 450-24T's with Cascade stack

[jdeane]

I have noticed that under the Port Configuration that the Switch and Stack are running at 10Mb Half duplex. Autonegotiation is enabled.

I can increase this to 100Mb Full duplex but have not done so yet as I can't find in the user guide what these 2 options actually do. The default in the guide also shows these ports at 10/Half.

My question is what do these 2 options do? and will increasing the speed make a difference to the stack performance?

Thanks

Jonathan

 

[jimbopalmer]

The options for switch and stack are the defaults a port is set to if Autonegotiation Fails, you want to leave it at 10/half. I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[eurobadger]

Each switch port will autonegotiate with the device connected to it to give the fastest transfer speed, assuming that the autonegotiate protocol on that other device matches that on the port.

100 Mb/s is indeed faster than 10 and full duplex will allow transfer in both directions at the same time.

If the autonegotiation protocols do not match, then it is possible that either the speed or duplex setting, or even both, might not negotiate properly, giving at best transmissions with lots of errors, but more likely no transfer at all.

If you know the capabilities of the NIC card in the device you are connecting to the port, then manually set the port to match.

A setting for 'switch' will be set as the default on all ports on that switch, so setting autonegotiate on the switch will allow all ports to autonegotiate. You can the set individual ports to the speed/duplex values you require. Similarly if the majority of attached NICs are capable of full-duplex, 100 Mb, then set the switch to that, and modify the ports individually to match other NIC cards.
In the same way 'stack' settings set the default on all ports in the stack, which can contain up to eight switches.

EB