I am looking into purchasing a better than home office quality gigabit switch for my office network/render farm (about 6 computers +printers + VOIP phone + scanners etc etc). What are people who are graphics and video oriented using? What are areas I should focus on to get the most effective data management?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Graham Calhoun
President
Forensic ProMedia

D-Link DGS1005D - 5 ports, though they do make 8, 16 and 24 port versions. Noticably better throughput than when going through my 10/100 router.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

I’m using a Netgear Prosafe 24 here and works like a champ w/8 active workstations and the rest of the support equipment you mentioned above. I had been using a Cisco Soho before expanding and it was a pain to work with. The config shown at the bottom is pretty much what works for us minus the GS108:
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/SmartSwitches/GS724T.aspx
What’s your current server config though? Network’s only as strong as the weakest link.