Question My Old Netgear GS116NA Bit The Dust, Looking For Recommendations For A Replacement.

[Cyber_Akuma]

Had a power outage, and when everything came back online I noticed that nothing would connect to the internet or even to each other. Then I noticed that my Netgear GS116NA was showing absolutely no lights or activity whatsoever. Tried a multimeter on the AC adapter and got a (unsteady, but it was hard to get the test leads in there) reading, so it seems like the switch itself died. I see that I can get a new one for about $90, but figured since it's dead and I got this over a decade ago I would also see what options I have for an upgrade if it's affordable. I wasn't doing anything fancy with it, I just had it plugged into my router and everything in the house that used a wired Ethernet connection plugged into the switch.

I never used all 16 ports, but so far 8 of them are used, so I would like to try to find one that is at least 10 ports. And was hoping to find something that was 2.5Gigabit or 10 Gigabit. Best I could find was the Netgear GS110EMX which goes for around $200-250, and is managed. I don't really need a managed switch (like I said, all I did was just plug all my Ethernet devices into it and then plug that into my router) nor would I know how to use one, but I can't find an unmanaged version. Everything 2.5Gbit or higher from Netgear appears to be managed.

Can anyone recommend a 10+ port unmanaged switch for me? Is Netgear still the go-to or is that outdated information now since I last looked into this over a decade ago? Are there any that are more affordable than the GS110EMX?

 

[bill001g]

Most switches faster that 1gbit tend to be managed. Other than paying for something you are not going to use it really doesn't matter a lot. By default out of the box most these devices will function like a unmanged switch. Really the only feature people tend to use on a managed switch is vlans and by default they just put all the ports on the same vlan. Now HP and cisco commercial switches a very different story. Those tend to do nothing until you configure them.

It gets quite a bit more expensive to jump from 8 port to anything larger. You might be better off buy a 8 port switch and then using a small switch for devices that could share a 1gbit port to the main switch.

You will find quite a list of 8 port unmanaged switches that can run 2.5gbit for fairly inexpensive. Gets quite a bit more if you want 10gbit.

In general none of the switch makers like netgear etc actually make any of the chips inside. Pretty much all vendor buy the same actual switching chips from one or two providers. These smaller unmanaged switches many times just have different names on the box but internally are pretty much the same. The technology is actually very old so there is not much in the way of performance differences. The main difference I guess will be the power supply and the case.

What I would actually recommend is just buy say a 16 port 1gbit tplink switch that sells for $66 on amazon. You can get other brands link tenda for about $50. There might even be cheaper ones. It is very surprising your switch failed these things tend to run forever. Maybe you got a power surge.

When you really know what you need for faster networks you can then decide what switches would be best. Although 2.5g is getting cheaper, 10gbit switch get expensive fast. In general unless you have some need to transfer files internally inside your house you barely even need 1gbit.

 

[Cyber_Akuma]

This is going to start showing my lack of understanding of networking but, can you plug a switch into a switch? Like, can I get an 8-port unmanaged 2.5 or 10 Gigabit switch and then plug an 8 or larger port gigabit switch into that for my slower devices? And would they still all appear to be on the same subnet like they are now?

 

[bill001g]

There is some theoretical limit into how many switches you can daisy chain but it is some huge number, likely a few hundred.

A switch is a layer 2 device it uses mac addresses and mac addresses have no real concept of subnets or networks in general. Pretty much it keep track of some list of mac addresses it sees on a port.

The only restriction would be that all the device on the second switch will share the bandwidth to the main switch. That is why you used to/still do see switch with what they call uplink ports. So you could have a switch wtih say 8 1 gbit port and a 10gbit port uplink to the main switch. Then again if you are exceeding 1gbit uplink you need to learn lots more about network design.