Hooking Up Equipment

[itstechnical]

Newby here to the forum and I'm not exactly sure if this is the correct category. I'm trying to figure out the best way to hook up some equipment and I hope I can explain this clearly. I have 5 wired connections for computers to connect to the internet, I will soon have 5 wired connections for media streaming boxes, I have 2 network storage devices (1 has movies and 1 has pictures and other things). I have a cable modem (provided by cable company) and netgear wireless router. I have a stand alone computer for the media server. What is the best way to hook all of this up? Do I separate the media streaming connections and internet connections on different switches? I know the media streaming boxes will be using the internet but will be mainly streaming from my storage devices. Need help.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

Your best bet is to buy a 16 port managed Gigabit switch and connect the devices to it. A CAT5e cable will be fine; there's no need to buy more expensive CAT6 cables.

There's no reason why you can't connect everything to the same switch, unless of course you purposely want to isolate particular hosts. If that was the case, you could still connect everything and then create a VLAN, making certain switch ports isolated from the others.

 

[itstechnical]

Your best bet is to buy a 16 port managed Gigabit switch and connect the devices to it. A CAT5e cable will be fine; there's no need to buy more expensive CAT6 cables.

There's no reason why you can't connect everything to the same switch, unless of course you purposely want to isolate particular hosts. If that was the case, you could still connect everything and then create a VLAN, making certain switch ports isolated from the others.

Thanks for the help