Help a noob setup a home network/media server

[Foz2001]

I look at a lot of these threads and it seems like a lot of people have 'switches.' What is the point of a switch if your wireless router has 4 ports and that's all you need? Any benefits?

 

[PTNL]

I look at a lot of these threads and it seems like a lot of people have 'switches.' What is the point of a switch if your wireless router has 4 ports and that's all you need? Any benefits?

GbE comes to mind, as doing large transfers between machines would be noticeably better versus wireless or the 10/100 ports on the router.

 

[hiodie]

^^ This is why I purchased a switch. My router supposedly had 10/100, but I would only see 3-4 MBps if I was lucky.

 

[Kaiga]

Well for one if you have more than 4 devices on your network that require internet connectivity obviously a bigger switch is needed. However more benefits can be had, such as a standalone switch can provide more throughput because it has more processing power. There also might be features on the switch that the router can't provide such as VLAN configurations.
Also some switches can provide services that the router sometimes can't such as if you have a bigger more complex network with multiple paths, switches might have things you need like Spanning Tree Protocol.
Also the router may just be something there to be a box to connect to the internet, the switch can be more important if the user wants to run gigabit on their LAN if their router doesn't have ports that fast.
For instance one 10/100 link on the router is trunked (connected) to a switch that has all gigabit ports (10/100/1000) so that the user may use gigabit compatible devices on their local network and still get to the internet.