I took a trip down to my local Micro Center today. One of the gems of the trip was finding out the Gigabit networking is finally affordable. Card prices have been dropping considerably, gigabit has been in Macs for years now. The thing that had been holding everything back was the switching hardware. Hubs or switches with even one gigabit port were outrageously expensive. Hubs/switches with ports that were all 10/100/1000 were extremely expensive (read: hundreds of dollars) and not ont he retail shelves.
That was then.
Today I saw on the shelf a Hawking Tech HGA32T: a gigabit PCI card with about the same footprint as any generic Realtek-style card. You know, the ones that you buy on sale for $5-10 just so that you have an extra laying around. The beautiful part about this gigabit card is the price: $20 bucks. That’s all well and good, you’ve been able to find gigabit cards in the $40-50 range for quite some time if you found them on sale. Switches are going to be a problem still. Right?
Wrong.
I tried to search out a gigabit switch (mostly so that I could prove my point to a friend that they were still too expensive), and found one. Enter the Hawking Tech H-GS8T. 8 ports of full-on 10/100/1000 autosensing, full-duplex goodness. The price? $130. Holy crap, this stuff is finally affordable!
Of course this Hawking tech gear is good but not top of the line. The switch does not have a huge buffer and you’re probably never going to see the theoretical maximum throughput, but who cares, it’s cheap! I’ll bet that you can see and feel an improvement over 10/100 at the very least.
So hey, someday I might even migrate to gigabit.