Question Which brands produce excellent networking switches in recent years?

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modeonoff

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Jul 16, 2017
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Hello, in the past Trendnet, TP-LINK and Netgear were the three most well-known brands for networking devices. How about in recent years? Looking to buy a switch.
 
Eximo said:
10Gbps network equipment is still a little beyond the home use field.

2.5Gbps might be doable on the cheap, but for 10Gbps you may have to branch into the managed switch territory in the several hundred dollar range.


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Thank you. If I don't mind manually unplugging and plugging cable to different computers, will a 2x10G port switch work? NAS has 10G. Two PCs have 10G but I may only need to connect one PC to the NAS at a time for fast backup.

For future proof, maybe better to have three 10G ports. How come most switches, especially those from QNAP, with three or more 10G ports are in SFP+ format? Some only offer one SFP+/RJ45 combo port?
 
tplink makes a 5 port 10gbit switch for about $250. It is still rare that any home application can use 10gbit. It takes careful design because it is far more than just the network to get really fast speeds. You need the disk and file system on both ends of the connection. This tends to be very expensive to do correctly so you pretty much only see in in business installation that can justify the costs. If you are using it only for backup is it really worth the costs. Does the backup complete using 1gbit ports say while you are in bed sleeping, does it really matter if it completely faster.
 
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I bought a Netgear switch from their professional line about 6-7 years ago and it's still ticking. So Netgear's professional stuff at least gets my recommendation.

I wish I could say the same about their consumer products though.

Also there's no point in upgrading to 10Gbps if your equipment doesn't even have a use case for it. For instance, unless you're running a NAS with SSDs, you're never going to saturate 10Gbps unless you do something dumb like an 8-way RAID0.
 
hotaru.hino said:
I bought a Netgear switch from their professional line about 6-7 years ago and it's still ticking. So Netgear's professional stuff at least gets my recommendation.

I wish I could say the same about their consumer products though.

Also there's no point in upgrading to 10Gbps if your equipment doesn't even have a use case for it. For instance, unless you're running a NAS with SSDs, you're never going to saturate 10Gbps unless you do something dumb like an 8-way RAID0.
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2.5Gbps should work for any hard drive based solution.

If you bump it up to have only SSDs in the NAS, then 10Gbps is needed, even if they are SATA.
 
Eximo said:
If you bump it up to have only SSDs in the NAS, then 10Gbps is needed, even if they are SATA.
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Even then, it depends on what you're doing.

On a gigabit LAN, talking to spinning HDD:
My nightly incremental backups take 1-2 mins per drive
Playing a movie from the NAS out to one of the PCs starts instantly
Downloading something from the innerwebs is limited by the ISP speed, not the LAN
I do have 1x SATA SSD in the NAS, but the ~90TB HDD will $tay $pinning

I can't imagine any circumstance where upgrading my whole LAN ecosystem from gigabit to 2.5 or 10GBe would make any sense.
 
Full nightly backups. Maybe distribution/cloning of large RAW video files. About the only 'small scale' operation I can think of that would benefit.

I still do direct drive installation for backup. Just plug a drive in, back it up overnight and put it back on the shelf.

Haven't done anything to my gaming rig in a while, so it is static with cloud backup for the currently installed games. Just swapped the main drive of my HTPC to NVMe, so I have fresh snap shot of the pre-upgrade on a SATA SSD.

Actually now in a position to have one of my machines act as the host of an NVMe drive exclusively for backup purposes (both also 2.5Gbps equipped). Would be kind of nice to have like an 8TB QLC drive with all of my OS clones on it for fast retrieval. But every time I think of doing it, I realize that the potential downtime has so little impact on what I do with my PCs. 95% entertainment at this point. Long as I have my personal files backed up, everything is replaceable.

Also still need to figure out a decent way to get an ethernet cable over to the modem. Most inconvenient in my house. All the wiring in my office goes through the ceiling/wall. And the living room is most easily accessible from underneath. So I have to fish something through an entire vertical wall somewhere...
 
bill001g said:
tplink makes a 5 port 10gbit switch for about $250. It is still rare that any home application can use 10gbit. It takes careful design because it is far more than just the network to get really fast speeds. You need the disk and file system on both ends of the connection. This tends to be very expensive to do correctly so you pretty much only see in in business installation that can justify the costs. If you are using it only for backup is it really worth the costs. Does the backup complete using 1gbit ports say while you are in bed sleeping, does it really matter if it completely faster.
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It will be in my bedroom so the noise will probably drive me crazy.
 
modeonoff said:
It will be in my bedroom so the noise will probably drive me crazy.
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Be very careful about reading the reviews on that switch it appears there are reviews for multiple devices all mixed together.
That switch does not have a fan so it is silent. In addition you see lots of complaints about things like vlans and firmware updates how bad the web interface it etc etc. This is a unmanged switch. Everything is hardware asic based. There is no firmware it can not be configured and it just simple switching there are no advanced features.

Now I guess ports fail on any device but it is very rare. I have a number of 1gbit tplink switch both managed and unmanged. The only ones I have had fail a lightning strike took out.

You really have no other cost effective option and $270 on sale is still kinda expensive to me.
 
Given the price of switches with more than two 10GbE ports is about 10 times the price of switch with only one GbE port, if setting up a new wired home network is it better to get 1GbE switch or 2.5GbE switch?
 
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Even if you have SSDs in your NAS, I'd still find it hard to find a reason to upgrade to 10GbE unless your time is literally money and you're Jeff Bezos rich (or as the story went, if Bill Gates dropped a $100 bill, it'd be cheaper for him to ignore it than to pick it up).

The only other reason I may say it's worth it is if you're constantly shipping around terabytes of data across the network, but again, how much of your time is worth in the cost difference?
 
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