Introduction
In our Network Switch 101 article, we defined unmanaged switches and discussed the features they provide, hopefully giving you a general understanding of switching technology.
For this initial review, we rounded up three unmanaged switches to test: Netgear's GS308, Amped Wireless' G8SW and ZyXEL's GS-108B. Each contender comes armed with eight 1 Gb/s ports.
Specifications
Netgear GS308
Amped Wireless G8SW
ZyXEL GS-108B
Naturally, there are features shared across all three models, including a memory buffer, a MAC table and jumbo frame support.
The memory buffer stores incoming packets until the switch can determine where they're going and the interface to send them out over. The MAC table is a repository for physical addresses. When a device sends out information, the switch records its address and corresponding port. The switch looks to the MAC table as a reference to see if it already knows what port to send information out of. This greatly reduces traffic, so the switch is not flooded entirely once physical addresses are known. Jumbo frames are Ethernet frames that contain more than 1500 bytes, with 9000 bytes tending to be used as a conventional MTU size. Jumbo frame support can be useful for lowering resource utilization, as the switch's CPU only has to process one large frame instead of multiple smaller ones, and increasing throughput.
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TV
Blueray player
2 consoles
Streaming media player
Audio amplifier
Home theater PC
8 port barely does it for the living room. We need some reviews of 16 and 24 port gigabit switches for the home, plus I'm sick and tired of gigabit and want 10GBE already, but all of the equipment seems horrifically expensive or has flaky drivers.
What' is good in 10GBE both adapters and switches?
For 10GbE switches, as far as I can tell there aren't any good cheap consumer items on the market yet. There is a flood of 'cheap' used profesional equipment available... but even then you are looking at $1-200 per adapter, and ~$1K for a switch, and typically not in great condition... and because it is pro equipment you have to do a bit of research to get it working properly.
10GbE 'is coming' but I think we are still a few years out from seeing normal consumer 'plug and play' equipment, and a few more years before it becomes affordable.
First - unless you have some insane connection to the outside world, the most you can really get right now as far as internet speeds is 1Gb anyhow. That becomes your choke point.
Next, overall, video is the most demanding when it comes to traffic, and the average bitrate requirement for 4k streaming comes in somewhere around 15Mbit. Doing the math, that means an average 1Gbit connection could support about 60 concurrent streams. Your average home WON'T be doing that. Honestly, a small apartment complex wouldn't even hit that.
Now, who knows what the future will bring, perhaps some killer app might require that kind of bandwidth, but right now it's not here for the majority of the people. That doesn't mean that we should stop developing and investing in increased bandwidth, but right now 10GbE is a bit over the top for a home network.
I agree. I personally went with a Cisco SG100-16 for only $109 at the time (Amazon), but it hasn't changed much either. Up now, down later, etc. Like everything on the net.
I do have some 10G gear myself but it's easier just to do some port ganging, teaming or aggregation. But that requires a different switch yet again. Wee... But then also you'd burn through ports faster.
(2) would have been nice to see a large file transfer done 3 times using one switch to get the variance and then done for all switches just to confirm that the micro benchmarks (which say we won't see a difference) are accurate.
(2) I did not see what was measured for response time. Maybe I missed it. Interesting to note most SSDs can deliver 4K of data in roughly the same time as the measured 'response time'