Best method to connect multiple switches to my router

[okkman]

My home network consists of a cable broadband connection, distributed by a Cisco M10 Valet router which acts as the DHCP server. I have a total of 40 cat6 jacks spread throughout my house, and currently there are three switches in the network, a LevelOne GSW-2440 24 port managed, a TP-Link TL-SG1016 16 port unmanaged, and a Netgear 10/100/1000 5 port unmanaged. My question is whether I should connect each switch directly to the 4 LAN ports on the M10, or if it's more correct to cascade from one to the next to the next? The LevelOne switch offers tons of customization, would it improve network performance to have the two smaller switches coming into that one and then take advantage of it's advanced features like Aggregation, QoS or VLAN? I'm just a hobbyist so I know very little about networking. Thanks for your opinions.

 

[boosted1g]

For general network design, you would have the other swtiches cascaded off of the primary sitch.

In your case you have a mix of managed and unmanaged switches.
If you want the unmanned switches to have the polices and benefits of the managed switch then you will need to cascade them
If you explicitly do not want the unmanaged switches to have this then you would not cascade it.

FYI you can tag an entire unmanaged switch to be on a specific VLAN, but unless that switch supports VLAN tagging you cant specify which ports of a unmanaged switch belong to which VLAN

 

[okkman]

Thanks Boosted,

I currently have all of the settings on the managed switch set to default, so I'm not actually using any of it's advanced functionality. I guess my biggest concern would be future proofing the LAN, so I could take advantage of those features if I needed to later. I can't even imagine a scenario where I would need to, so it's probably not terribly important right now. I just wanted to avoid any mistakes that would cause major headaches before I power everything up. Wish me luck!