>
>I have never been in a situation to verify this, just been told so by others who were more into networks than I ever have been.

Well, in a loop of N devices, you can have N packets transferring at the same time.  In ethernet, you can have one, or two if it's full duplex (most aren't)

Of course ethernet goes faster..

One little thing to be aware of, if a device is broken, or removed from the ring, then everything stops.  Single point failures can be diagnosed by periodic "I'm OK" packets which make it up the remaining segment of the ring to the master.

If Z,Y, and X are reporting, then the faiure must be between X and W.
Packets sent out from the master might be getting to W, but you can't know for sure.

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