> It needs 16 Gb switching capacity; it is duplex. I don't think this is the correct terminology. "Switching capacity", as far as I can tell, is the simple add

> It needs 16 Gb switching capacity; it is duplex. I don't think this is the correct terminology. "Switching capacity", as far as I can tell, is the simple addition of the speeds of all the ports. So 16 Gbps switching capacity isn't something it needs, it's something it has simply from the nature of having those 8x 1 GbE full-duplex ports. What we're talking about here that we'd need to not bottleneck, would be called either "non-blocking throughput" or "backplane bandwidth". And even on higher end switches, the switching capacity and backplane bandwidth are usually not equal. I'd be surprised if the same wasn't true for consumer switches (though maybe it is since there's far fewer ports on consumer switches than enterprise switches). (There's also a packets per second metric that determines how much the switch can handle, but I'm assuming that's only going to be a bottleneck if your packet sizes are too low)