It all depends how much traffic goes through that router; if it's a internet gateway, then how much bandwidth is available; and what kind/ what amount traffic between office PC's
1. Thats right, but it will be unsignificant difference, if you're not running very traffic sensitive applications.
2. This setup will create additional latency; in case of daisy-chaining one switch will have 1 bridge hop to gateway, second will have 2, thrid will have 3 hops. I would do a star - plug your router into one switch and plug other two into that switch.
3. gigabit uplinks will make a difference only in case if you havea lot of traffic between office pc's or you will have a lot of traffic going through the router.
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by: brakk0Posted on 2008-07-01 at 14:29:37ID: 21911798
With your current hardware, (assuming your current switches are also 10/100) I would connect one switch to the router and the other two switches to that switch directly (they don't have to be dasy chained all in one line). Then, also assuming your internet connection is less than 100M, you probably won't see any difference in speed between workstations on each switch. This is essentially what you are suggesting in #2, but you don't need to buy any more hardware since I doubt your internet connection is anywhere near 100M.
Even though your switches are 10/100, each switch can internally handle a lot more than 100M of traffic, it's just that each port is limited to 100M. So, when you connect your switches together through one of the 100M ports that creates a bottleneck so that the traffic between switches is limited to 100M. By connecting them in a "Y" as described above, you get two 100M ports to the switch with the router instead of just one and it will be a lot more efficient. I would also put any servers on the central switch to allow faster access from workstations.
This is why some switches have 1000M uplink ports for joining switches together.
I'm not sure what you mean by #3, but changing out your switches to gig switches would have no impact on your internet connection. Going to gig switches or 10/100 switches with gig uplink ports might help internal traffic depending on what internal services you are running.
Hope this makes sense.