What is the difference between “cut-through” and “store-and-forward” switches?
Cut-Through: The switch will begin forwarding data after it receives the DA (destination address) of the frame, the difference between this and store-and-forward is that store-and-forward receives the whole frame before forwarding. Since frame errors cannot be detected by reading only the DA, cut-through may impact network performance by forwarding corrupted or truncated frames. These “bad” frames can create broadcast storms wherein several devices on the network respond to the corrupted frames simultaneously. Advantages of Cut-Through: + Cut-Through is faster because the packet is sent as soon as the first eight bytes are received. + Cut-Through requires less memory since the switch only reads the address but does not store the entire message. Disadvantages of Cut-Through: + Bad packets are perpetuated, taking up bandwidth. + Benefits diminish in the high traffic networks. + Cut-Through cannot be used on networks that use both Ethernet and Fast Ethernet. The network must be one or the
