Small Business Network Upgrade Recommendations?

[Boma]

I'm a relatively new sys admin at my company.


We're running a Netopia T1 Router, RV082 Linksys VPN Router, and a D-Link DES-1024D 10/100 Fast Ethernet Switch. Currently, data transfer between computers seems kinda of slow when moving large files.

Some of the cables are CAT3 (I can't believe I saw that).

How much of a benefit would we get from upgrading to gigabit switch? Most of the pc's here have onboard nic's; but a good amount are only 10/100. I also plan on switching some of the old wiring to cat6. Should I leave the CAT5 alone?

We also have a dell poweredge 2500 server running linux samba. It doesn't have gigabit ethernet.

What Switch would you recommended? I see some that have "Smart Web" technology and SFP technology. What does that do?

Newegg.com - D-Link DGS-1224T 10/100/1000Mbps Web-Smart Switch With 2 Combo SFP Expansion Slots 24 Ports 10/100/1000Mbps with 2 Combo SFP Expansion Slots 8K MAC Address Table 512KB Buffer Memory - Switches


I seems like it would be a lot of work to get this whole network converted to gigabit.

Thanks!

 

[SparkMonkeyHellion]

Well your Cat3 is your bottleneck currently. We have mostly 100 Mb at my network, and we have tons of traffic (image databases) and it's fine. I'd say start by just upgrading all that Cat3 to Cat5e

 

[Boma]

Thanks I will do that!

 

[kmote]

There is no point upgrading to a gig switch if the rest of your infrastructure is 100Mb/s or slower.