Hardware

It’s difficult to deny that for any network to function successfully, you need specialized computer Hardware. However, without the right knowledge, you will not be able to choose the right equipment and you can end up with a faulty network. This short article hopes to outline some of the Hardware necessary for a fully functioning and successful network.

The three pieces of equipment to be covered in this article are:

• Network Switch
• Network Hub
• Network Attached Storage
  

A network hub, also known as an ethernet hub, is probably the most unsophisticated piece of Hardware in computer networking. This is because all it does is receive data packets from every single port and broadcast them out through every single port without taking into account the source or destination. This results in many problems, in particular, packet collisions. However, many people still use hubs due to it being relatively cheap.

A network switch is a Hardware device that sends traffic from one part of a network to different parts of the network. While it may appear to be similar to a hub, they are generally more intelligent and more expensive. The reason why they are more intelligent is because they have the capacity to analyze the source and the destination of the data packets that they receive and this way they are able to forward it to the correct destination.

Finally, a network router is a very sophisticated piece of network Hardware which can determine the next point to forward any data packet it receives so that it reaches its destination.

Whatever you do in networking, don’t forget about Hardware.