Daisy Chaining Switches

Daisy chaining switches will not give you any redundancy. There will always be one switch (the first) connected to the router, and there will always be one switch at the end of the chain. If the last switch in the chain fails, only the users connected to it will lose connectivity. If the first or the second switch fail, all users connected to that switch, as well as all switches further down the chain will also lose connectivity.

There would be no "speed" advantage to this setup.

Also,three daisy-chained 8-port switches will not give you the equivalent of a 24-port switch (unless each switch has a dedicated uplink port).

This would actually introduce more latentcy in your network for anyone on the third switch trying to access data from a device on the first switch.

If you want redundancy then you need to hook things up in parallel, not serially (daily chain).

Run your 8 ports into a 4 port.

Lee

You will be better off with one 24 port switch, for the following reasons:
* Faster connections between clients.
* Single point of failure, in the case, a bonus
* Cost bennefit.

More detailed explaintaion for the above would be:
(1) Your data throughput between each switch is only 100 MB. So if multiple computers on one switch are trying to reach another switch, you'll be forces to the 100MB maximum. However, many larger (24-port) switches have an internal switching network of 3000MB+ speeds, which would enable you to have any node connect with any other node at wire-speed simulatenously.
(2) Single point of failure, so that if you switch was to fail, simply replace the one unit. The multi-switch option wouldn't really add any redunancy becuse your file server or network printers will sit on a only one switch, if that switch fails, then all network services stop anyways. (In larger networks we do redundancy, but it is far more complex and costly).
(3) You'll find that it is more cost effective to purchase one 24 port switch, than three seperate switch. Add to that the extra space you'll need for the units and extra power cords, enegery cost (which is only going up). Add to that the speed/performance increases as illustrated above.

Also, a few other thoughts:
* In low cost switches, failure of one port is rare; usually the whole unit fails, due to power supply or other centeral componet.
* Do not connect switchs in any form of a loop. IE: switch a - > b & a -> c or a -> b -> c are OK. Do NOT go a - > b -> c -> a. Any inexpensive siwtchs are not able to handle this and looping will slow down network performance - event to a stand-still. The function that prevents looping is called STP (Spanning Tree Protcol).

Hope this helps,

Jason Olson