what gigabit switch (8 port) to select

I recently bought this one "3CGSU08-ME"

In Norway it costs Kr. 650,- NOK = ? 81,15 EURO For its price, you get a good name, and a fancy look ;->

I had to put black tape in front of the LED's as I cant stand that STRONG flashing blue light.

/Hca

You usually get what you pay for. Cheap one are - cheap. You really must ask yourself "how much performance do i need" "and how do i figure out where my bottleneck is". A cisco 4948 would give you top performance, but can you fill it ?

Said that, get a cheap one, chances are that the bridge is not your bottleneck.

phn wrote: (snip)

I believe that there are chip sets, or maybe a single chip for the smaller switches, so all one has to do is build a box and power supply around one.

For home use, I would agree. It might be that more expensive ones have a better power supply, for example, and would be better in some environments.

-- glen

Not sure if it is in the desired price range, but HP ProCurve has an 8 port Gigabit Ethernet switch out there now:

are managed versions, and then there are:

which are unmanaged. I've had occasion to use the 2724 myself and was happy with it. I've not had occasion yet to try the 1800's - while I'm not in the ProCurve part of the HP house, the old saying about the cobblers children still applies :)

rick jones

How about a Dell PowerConnect 2724 Managed switch.. Sure it's got 24 ports, but it seems like a full featured switch.. They can be had on Ebay for

I like the Procurve line but be careful, there are small switches in the product line that are unmanaged.

Can someone give me the $0.02 rundown on why a managed switch is better than an unmanaged one? In my case I'm looking for one that can go in my house to run Gigabit ethernet throughout all rooms, etc. I don't want a cheapie piece of crap that is likely going to keel over after a year or two of service -- as long as it doesn't cost $2k or something. I'll check into the HP ProCurves to check them out as well.

That seems odd--pinging from one switch to another times out.. How long was the timeout set for? Isn't that usually something like a couple of seconds? Perhaps that's why their switch is cheap?

Good to know I guess..

There is no advantage if your application is trivial or problem resolution is not time-critical.

When you have equipment rooms all over campus, and you need to check remotely which switch is doing what, a managed switch is better.

For home use, it probably doesn't matter much.

-- glen

As others have pointed-out, if it is a situation with lots of switches, it is nice to be able to check stats and such everywhere.

An unmanaged switch is always autoneg. Personally I like autoneg, but there are still some people who want to hardcode everything - that requires "management."

I suspect that "management" is required to to teaming/trunking/bonding/aggregation of links.

rick jones

[ ... ]

rickf> Can someone give me the $0.02 rundown on why a managed rickf> switch is better than an unmanaged one?

As other posters have said, depends on the application. Very roughly a managed switch is one that runs an operating system which allows you to do remote configuration and monitoring. These tend to be ''corporate'' switches/brouters/routers.

rickf> In my case I'm looking for one that can go in my house to rickf> run Gigabit ethernet throughout all rooms, etc. I don't rickf> want a cheapie piece of crap that is likely going to keel rickf> over after a year or two of service [ ... ]

Cheap chinese made switches, like all ''real cheap'' stuff coming from China, often last way less than a year or two, a bit like with Taiwanese PC components 20-25 years ago. You can get lucky though.

Anyhow even if you don't need remote switch configuration and monitoring ''managed'' switches tend to be built for corporate customers, and thus usually to better standards than ''unmanaged'' ones, a bit like corporate oriented laptops tend to be rather more robust than consumer oriented ones, not just having more ''manageability'' features.

Anyhow there are some low end managed switches that are slapped together with badly written software and low quality parts, so beware a bit.

Same BTW for things like ADSL gateways; I got very tired of the appalling software and heat and unreliability of a $100 ''consumer'' one, and bought instead a small-corporate oriented Draytek for arounbd $200 and it is very much better built and less buggy (still on the cheap side, but more value than cheap).

I've had two Linksys EG008W 8-port Gig-E's for several years now. For home use they are just fine. Currently its about $85 mailorder.

(Careful with the model number, Linksys also sells a 1-port Gig-E w. 7-port 100baseTX with a similar number.)

-wolfgang

Thanks all for the quickie background on the managed vs unmanaged switches.. Good to know!

The key difference in managed vs unmanaged in a small setup in my opinion is that when things are "strange" you can better track down what might be going on.

When prints are taking 1 hour you can go into the switch and discover that 7 of 8 packets are getting CRC errors. (Real situation.)

And other things.

The key difference in managed vs unmanaged in a small setup in my opinion is that when things are "strange" you can better track down what might be going on.

When prints are taking 1 hour you can go into the switch and discover that 7 of 8 packets are getting CRC errors. (Real situation.)

And other things.

The other choice is to plug in another switch and see what happens.