To support a certain bandwidth on a switch you need big enough buffers. Bandwidth delay product is what you want - latency * bandwidth, you need a buffer of at

To support a certain bandwidth on a switch you need big enough buffers. Bandwidth delay product is what you want - latency * bandwidth, you need a buffer of at least that size to support throughput in the system. Multiply that by the number of ports to support concurrent bandwidth. The toughswitches were engineered with very small buffers, such that they couldn't even support reasonable bandwidth on a LAN with low latency.