July 1995 / BYTE Lab Product Report

29 Switching Hubs Save The Bandwidth Inside a Switching Hub	Because they're more efficient, more convenient, and increasingly less expensive, Ethernet switching hubs are replacing router-repeater setups in LANs - by Tadesse W. Giorgis
Store-And-Forwards WEIGHTING FOR BEST OVERALL IT DOES IT ALL AND DOES IT WELL FOR SMALL, STABLE WORKGROUPS FOR LARGE LANS THAT KEEP GROWING Lannet LET-10 MultiNet Switching Hub and LANswitch Modules Nbase NH208 MegaSwitch Lannet LET-10/20/36 MultiNet Putting The Brakes On Runaway Frames A Network in Need of Flow Control	Unlike a cut-through switch, which starts to transmit a frame before it has completely received it, a store-and-forward switch waits until it has received a whole packet into its buffer before forwarding it.
Cut-Throughs WEIGHTING FOR BEST OVE RALL A HIGHLY EXPANDABLE SWITCHING MEISTER A PICK-ME-UP FOR TIRED LANS IT'S EXPANDABLE, FAST, AND FLEXIBLE NetWiz TurboSwitch-2000 Ornet LANbooster 2000 NetWiz TurboSwitch-2000 Xnet Series 1800 Parallelswitch XNET Series 1800 ParallelSwitch	Categorically, cut-through switches begin forwarding frames before they entirely receive them--on the fly.
How We Tested Switching Hub with Eight Ports The Analyzers DA-30 Protocol Analyzer	Our test suite evaluates the 29 10-Mbps Ethernet switches' performance by passi ng them through two rounds of benchmark tests.
Hub Glossary	ACTIVE PORT A switch or a repeater hub port through which communication is taking place.
Scaling Up with One MAC Address The FastSwitch 10/100 AG Workgroup Switch	What if you prefer a dedicated 10-Mbps port for each network device rather than having them share a 10-Mbps switching port?
Honorable Mentions Easy MIB Access with LCD Screen Kalpana Equals Convenience	NetWiz's TurboSwitch-2000, Fibronics' GigaHub, and Xedia's MADswitch 10 all provided MIB (Management Information Base) access via the front-panel LCD console.
Dubious Achievements It's a Snap, with DEChub One DECswitch 900EE Requires Hands-On	Both Digital Equipment's PEswitch 900TX and DECswitch 900EE can work with a snap-on DEChub One "power and out-of-band terminal connection" module that occasionally fails to make proper contact and crashes the switch.

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