I’m looking to replace my unmanaged Netgear FS105 with an 8-port gigabit switch. No fancy features, just an unmanaged switch. Also, I don’t reall have the internet speeds to take advantage of the ‘gigabit’ part (50Mbit down / 5Mbit up), but there’s not that much of a difference in price anymore, so why not?
I’m just wondering if there are any brands I should avoid (like with routers)? I’m also aiming for only 20€ or less (or maybe a few bucks more if the quality of the cheaper ones is crap).
Hey there,
I use TrendNET switches and they have worked perfectly so far. I have it personally and at work for enterprise environments. They come in metal housing and are very efficient. As per your request, no fancy features etc, I think it would suite you well. You can order them from Amazon, click here to find out more.
I hope this will help you out :)
Honestly, I'd upgrade to a Netgear GS108. I buy a lot of small switches for various clients at work, and the Netgears have been nothing but reliable. They also have a lifetime warranty for if it somehow manages to fail.
Guess I'll get one from Netgear then. Those form TrendNET aren't as cheap here (34€ for the cheapest).
Just wanted to make sure that there aren't any brands to avoid (If I recall correctly Logan mentioned a brand of routers a few times that aren't worth buying, and I don't mean some specific models but the whole brand).
Do you happen to know what the difference between the GS108 GE and the GS308-100PES is? I'm not familiar with network features and I certainly don't know which are worth the extra money.
Short answer is well none.
Long answer: Some of the differences I found when I quickly looked though the datasheet for both devices:
GS308 supports 802.3az (pretty useless for home usage, just reduces idle power for ports) as well as "short cable detection" which reduces power consumption if you use cables shorter than 10 meters (again, pretty useless since you won't save many watts over the course of several years).
The GS108 has a higher MTBF (mean time between failures) rating for some reason which I think is strange, since it seems like the GS308 is meant for small offices and the GS108 is meant for home usage. (GS108 is rated for over 1 million hours, and the GS308 is rated for 386,500 hours).
The GS108 has a longer warranty (Lifetime warranty compared to 3 year warranty).
Those are the only differences I could find. The rest such as maximum throughput, cache size and other things like that were exactly the same. I would just get the cheapest one if I were you.
Huh....that's quite strange. I would've guessed that a switch for (small) offices would be more expensive but the price is the exact opposite: the GS308 is by ~6€ (~33€ vs 27€). And the GS208 (plastic, no metal housing) goes for ~22€.
with gbit switches now requiring <10 watt it's pretty useless indeed. my 24 port uses 18 watt at the most.
As far as bandwidth is concerned your right about not being able to saturate the switch with Internet traffic according to your broadband connection's speed, however you may want to consider a gigabit switch over a 100mbps one if you intend on transferring large files often or to many clients on your network simultaneously. Also consider that you have a gigabit adapter in each machine to take advantage of these capabilities when comparing products and features. Cables too. You're right about the price as well. There isn't much reason NOT to pick up a gigabit infrastructure component anymore. Brand wise I cannot recall a switch or router brand that I've ever used that didn't perform adequately enough to steer you away from. TP-LINK is the cheapest I've found on Amazon.com here in the USA (TP-LINK TL-SG1008D $19.99/18.27€). Although I'm personally using a TRENDnet TEG-S5g myself which only has 5 ports. It serves my needs well and has been doing so for the past few years now (I think) without any issues. Get the cheapest one you can find as long as it suits your needs. By the way, what will you be using this for? What is your set-up like?
Cheers
Just as a sidenote: both my laptop and desktop PC support gigabit ethernet (the laptop even wireless-ac but that's kinda useless since my router doesn't support it and b) the walls in my apartment are too thick to provide a good enough signal).
Transfering files from my laptop to my desktop and vice versa would be awesome cause right now I always use my 64GB USB 3.0 flash drive. Just need to look up how to connect them (I genuinely suck at networking but my cousin studies business informatics and he can hopefully come over sometime and set it up for me).
The TP-Link TL-SG1008D also seems to be the cheapest one here (~20€ from Amazon.at).
I'm currently using the 5port switch to split the connection from my from my router - that's in another room - to my desktop PC, laptop, X360 and PS3, so currently all ports are in use and I want to have some free ports in case I need to hook up my old netbook or attach something like the Hootoo Logan uses for a better wifi signal in my room.
Network
Not too hard to connect it up Simply find a good location on your PC such as C drive and make a folder. Name is something like 'Public Shares' or whatever. Now all you do is simply share the folder.
You connect to that folder by going to Windows Explorer (ie My Computer) in the address bar type in \\computername or \\computerip and the Public Shares for example would show up as a shared network folder. You may need to use your PCs admin username and password to gain access though, since more than likely your not on a domain.
Huh, didn't know it was that easy^^ Worked without any problems.
The speed limiting factors here are both the speeds of the storage devices and the switch, right? So the lowest of the two should be the limit for the transfer speeds (i.e. the 100mb switch).
Well, looks like I can make use of the gigabit connection afterall before getting faster internet speeds from my ISP. 100mbit/s is terrible for transfering larger folders between PCs.
And it looks like I'm in luck: the TP-Link TL-SG1008D and Netgear GS208-100PES are already pretty cheap (20€ and 22€) and will be on sale tomorrow on Amazon :D
Yes that's right. Both PCs must have gigabit LAN adapters in order to take advantage of the full speed. If one PC however has a 10/100 then the switch is forced to slow down as well to be backwords compatable. RAM works the same way for example. You can't have 1600MHz RAM with 2100MHz, the 2100 will slow down to 1600 for them to both work.
Already checked, both support gigabit (one Intel, the other Realtek). The limiting factor is now the 10/100 switch. Also, once I have a gigabit switch the new limitation for speed will be the HDDs I'm transfering to/from (although they should have speeds of at least over 100MB/s).
Just out of curiosity: to take the transfer speeds to the next level and take advantage of SSD speeds there would be need for a 10gb switch (plus matching ports on the PCs), right?
Well in general yes. There is a kicker though. I'll explain since I am not sure what you got under the hood.
Hard drives with IDE interface sporting the ATA/133 specification should be able to support a theoretical 133 MB/s of data transfer, and the newer SATA specification should be able to breeze by the requirements, providing at least 1.5 Gb/s of bandwidth. Keep in mind, HDDs are not the only bottleneck. Sometimes cables and even controllers can be the issue.
For example, If you're using a controller that resides on the older PCI bus, the amount of data throughput theoretically available is 133 MB/s. While this seems enough for Gigabit Ethernet's 125 MB/s requirement, remember that the PCI bus bandwidth is shared throughout the whole system. Every add-in PCI card and many system resources will be sharing that bandwidth, limiting the amount available to the network card. On newer PCI Express (PCIe) systems, this should be a non-issue, as every PCIe lane has at least 250 MB/s exclusively available to it.
Another aspect of the network that’s often suspect is the network cabling. It is often claimed that poor speeds are guaranteed if the network cable is run close to interference-causing power cables and cords. Longer cable runs can also be problematic as copper Cat 5e cables are only certified for 100 meter (about 300 ft.) lengths. There are those who advocate using the newer Cat 6 standard instead of Cat 5e-class cable. While some of these claims are a little hard to quantify, we can certainly test how they might affect a small home gigabit network.
Sorry if I am rambling too much, I hope its not bothersome. In any case to answer your question, Yes, yes and yes. Consider though a 10GB switch is expensive. I saw an 8 port one on Newegg for $800 or so. You could opt for SSD with a gigabit switch, but keep in mind Gigabit has a 125MB/s limitation as I mentioned earlier and I personally think mechanical drives with the new SATA standard are fine. You should get about 60-80 MB/sec or so. There are so many factors from how full the drive is to if Read / Right to if your in RAID or not. I would make this post an article if I wrote all that :)
That's basically what I thought (didn't think about cables and controllers, though).
Last time I had something with IDE in my PC was with my old Pentium 4 over 8 years ago^^ Added my specs to my profile (laptop has a HGST 7K1000 in it) but in case it doesn't show up: i3-4130, Asrock H87 Pro4, 2x4GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9, Sapphire R7 260X 2GB OC, 840 Evo 120GB, 2x WD Blue 1TB, 1x Samsung HD154UI 1.5TB, 1x HGST 7k3000 3TB. All storage devices are connected to the motherboard via the SATA ports (no add-in cards).
My cables are Cat 5e at maximum (need to buy some new ones since a bunch of them don't look like they are of good quality). Played with the idea of making them myself in december after watching Qain's video about it but I ended up not doing that because I don't need that many to justify the cost of a whole spool plus the tools. The cablemanagement near the switch is....not as good as it could be (lots of other cables, power and HDMI cables from the consoels/TV/laptop, although the consoles and the TV are not getting any power at all most of the time).
Well, it would be okay if I used my M550 256GB in my laptop to increase the speeds even more (shared folder is located on my desktop, not laptop). Don't really want to put that kind of workload onto my 840 Evo (there's already much more work for it because of that "workaround" to counteract against the performance degradation). Plus, I need an HDD Caddy first because 256GB are not enough for my liking.
No no, of course not. I appreciate the detailed information a lot!
10gb was just out of curiosity. A motherboard with 10gb port would be overkill for my needs (not only because of the 10gb port). I also tend to keep my hardware until it breaks or just doesn't do the job anymore (not buying new stuff if the old stuff still works but in this case 10MB/s is a pain in the ass and an upgrade is worth it because I'll take advantage of the higher transferrates a lot, plus the cost of the upgrade is very low - ended up paying 17€ for the TP-Link switch you recommended).
I guess SSDs would give me an advantage over HDDs in scenarios where IOPS are important but I tend to keep my SSDs as "clean" as possible (only for OS, drivers and those programs that don't let you choose where to install them) and keep the workload at a minimum. For everything else I have my HDDs with enough space and acceptable speeds (6,5TB of 7200rpm drives should be enough^^).
Personally, I don't understand this. Why would you not want the programs/files being used most (workload) on the hardware that is most capable?
Wearout. I want my SSDs to last as long as possible. I like to take advantage of the faster boot times but other than that I don't really need the speeds of an SSD (as stupid as this may sound). My programs and games run perfectly fine on my HDDs. Loading times are minimal or depend on my internet connection (like, when I initially start Firefox with a lot of tabs). Also, I only have a 120GB SSD, there's not much space for my games collection (I like to have everything in one place, not scattered across different folders or even storage devices). I would need at least a 480GB SSD for my Steam collection alone (365GB; don't have every game installed, though, and not counting games purchased elsewhere). And I would need a new one pretty soon again. And the 256GB I have laying around will find its way into my laptop. It might be better to switch them (120GB into the laptop, 256GB into the desktop PC) since I plan on having both the SSD and a 2.5" 1TB HDD in the laptop but that's too much of a hassle, to be honest^^
I might purchase an SSD in the future for games only but that might require some re-organizing the HDDs first (6 SATA ports, 5 already in use and I like to keep one free for emergencies), swapping out the 1.5TB and one or both 1TB HDDs so I have only 3TB HDDs (would give me up to 12TB; pure overkill, I have no need for that amount of storage but I could remove two HDDs I have now, add a 3TB drive and end up with more storage space and free SATA ports than before). Then there's need for SATA cable-extension (the ones on my PSU are pretty stiff and the 2.5" bays are too close together when on top of each other or too far apart if next to each other - take a look at the Corsair 230T ;) ). This is more of a long-term upgrade that will take some time (mostly because of a very, very tight budget).
