Is 10 half duplex good choice on switch

unless there is a very specific reason, 10-half is not a good choice at all. and i can't think of any reasons why *every* workstation would need to be configured with a 10-half port.

I can think of two possibilities. First, the switch backplane doesn't have the switch fabric capacity to handle 100 full for everybody. If this is an old switch, it may not support anything more than 10 half except for its uplink. The other reason would be the NIC card(s) on the server. If the server only has one NIC and can barely support 100 full, they (the netadmins) may be trying to avoid a bottleneck at the server by limiting everyone else. The first place I would look to upgrade would be the server. See if you can get a second 100 Mb NIC in there and set up a channel connection to the switch for traffic load balancing. This is a standard feature on most Cisco switches. There are Gigabit NICs on the market, but reports show that even the latest & greatest servers haven't been able to handle more than around 400 Mbps. And always remember..."Your mileage may vary!"
Best Wishes.

I agree with ckilday, but to further the answer: I have never known a reason to lower the switch speeds. A switching network must be hierarchal in nature: From a large Core switch, to a small user-access switch. This also icludes hierarchal speeds: Gigabits in the core, Etherchannel in the distribution and 100MB for the users. So what's the big deal that Users have a 100MB link to the switch? The link from that switch to the server or the larger switch is what is more important and may be wherea bottleneck occurs. Smart switching designs allow for full bandwidth utilization, from top to bottom and does not need to manually set speeds.

another possibility could be the infrastructure. If the backbone is rated at 10 mbs that could be the answer. Unfortunately execs don't like paying $$$ for stuff they cannot see.

All of you have brought up very valid points, (except the first attempted answer), depending on the size of the networks, and placement of potential bottlenecks, these low speeds may be essential to the continuance of a working network. Many switches have blocking mode which will lock up the backplane to a particular port. Stopping all other traffic (including sys mgmt traffic sometimes). It is unnecessary (unless doing intense Multimedia, voice conferencing, or other bandwidth intensive projects) to need more than 10Mbps to the desktop. Even VoIP setups don't require 100Mbps to the desk (but the voice only requires 64kbps on G.711)So now you will hear the answer one more time, 'it depends' you could send me a .vsd or .dwg(f) and I could tell you if you'd like.

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