Switch Bottleneck?

My home network has a router with a comp, nas, and voip attached and a switch attached to 2xXbox360, other gaming consoles, and a media player. Today my wife was watching netflix on an XBox360 and I started watching a bluray movie (mkv) that was on a shared drive on my comp, on the media player. She started experiencing buffering problems with netflix. I shut down all other internet stuff and the problem persisted but only when I was watching the movie.

My thought is to flip the XBox360 and the NAS so that if the situation happens again the switch is not overloaded/the router could better manage the load. Is this a good idea? or do I need a better switch?

My router is a Netgear WNDR4500 and the switch is a Trendnet TEG-S80g. Both are gigabit.

I assume the bitrate you're streaming the movie at ~50Mb max, depending on how you encoded it. I also assume that the Netflix stream is pretty small. Even if your switch and router were not connected at 1Gb, it shouldn't be an issue.

The switch claims a 16Gb switching capacity, and a 128k buffer. At a smooth bitrate, the buffer should be more than sufficient. Without knowing what the switch is doing, it's a tough call.

Flipping them to have the router take all the load is certainly a viable option and if simple to do, just try it. As for a better switch, a Netgear GS308 for example, has a 1.5Mb buffer.

I don't know if I know what the switch is doing either. I'm going to try to duplicate the same thing tonight with the Netflix stream going straight from the router. Does it make sense that the switch could somehow be pooping out with this setup?

With correctly functioning hardware, there's no reason that your switch would be choking unless you have something else on the network soaking up the bandwidth. I'd be inclined to think that your switch (or, perhaps your router) are malfunctioning.

I'd vote for the former rather than the latter, in particular as it relates to the switch. It's pretty much a simple, passive device. If something did get hung up, a simple power cycle should clear it up if that is in fact the case.

As for the router, yeah, a reboot from time to time, unfortunately, is warranted.

As I hate threads that die with no update/resolution, any update?

It took me longer than I expected to rerun the wires. The xbox 360 and my NAS switched places on the network. So the xbox360 is attached to the router and the NAS to the switch.

Everything works great. I just did my best to bog it all down and there was no stuttering. I was able to stream a blu-ray with 7.1 MA on the media center (attached to switch), while watching netflix or Hulu+ on the xbox360 (now attached to the router directly), while I was was FTPing and doing some bittorrent stuff without limits on.

Weird stuff. Maybe I had a bad wire?