Switch advice please

As I said, depends on what you want to do. Managed switch are use for
1°) creating VLans to break down the network
2°) provide monitoring capabilities via SNMP
3°) provide port authentication (802.3x)
4°) to get POE ports for phones
5°) to stack and provide redundancy (try that without spanning tree you will cry)
6°) on high end devices for QoS and filtering abilities and basic routing (those strange things called L3 switches)
I think that covers at least 95% of usages. If you don't need those don't spend extra money IMO.

I think the OP wants LACP, which you didn't mention. For most users it doesn't provide much of a speed boost.

Is it really needed ? LACP is 802.3ad, I thought adaptive load balancing just got the same result with a mac address change to trick the switch. I may have misunderstood though : http://linux.cloudibee.com/2008/02/netw ... f-bonding/
And as you said having a machine with dual gigabit NIC sitting around or more than 3 wifi users leeching at the same time at full speed is quite rare at home, not mentioning that the NAS ro the destination machine wouldn't be able to keep up (RN104 doesn't and most single disk (non-SSD) machine won't be able to).

You are all right.

I was thinking of a managed switch for "future use", if/when I have my own place and a proper network in it. But considering the costs and the revisions, I'd better go for a unmanaged one, brand new.

I'll go for the GS108 or GS116 if you approve! But thanks for guiding me, much appreciated.

FWIW ALB didn't work for me with VirtualBox. LACP, no problem. I have so many plex, subsonic, and LMS clients that I do see LACP working. That is, both ports get a share of the traffic. nasmon or vnstat will show you what is going on. I have everything wired to that switch and then the switch goes to my router to leave the house.

steve

tony359 wrote:
considering the costs and the revisions, I'd better go for a unmanaged one, brand new. I'll go for the GS108 or GS116

You might also want to take a look at the "unmanaged plus" GS108E and GS116E. They don't have all the features of fully managed switches, but they have a few configurable options that you might feel are worth the small incremental cost over the unmanaged switches.

I've been very happy with mine.

Thanks fast

It looks lovely! as you say, a small incremental cost for lots of features. It also mention port trunking, but I can't find anything on the specifications. Is it something I can use with the NAS, is that the same protocol?

Thanks for your help!

As far as I can tell (I don't use it), their "port trunking" is 802.3ad Link Aggregation; I think that's supported by the ReadyNAS Pro. Port trunking is not available on the GS108E, but the GS116Ev2 (part number GS116E-200xxx) does support it.

fastfwd wrote:
As far as I can tell (I don't use it), their "port trunking" is 802.3ad Link Aggregation; I think that's supported by the ReadyNAS Pro. Port trunking is not available on the GS108E, but the GS116Ev2 (part number GS116E-200xxx) does support it.

I don't see 802.31ad or LACP listed on the GS116E datasheet (http://www.netgear.es/images/GS116E_DS_ ... -16292.pdf)

Well the smart switches' datasheet mentions port trunking. There must be something but I can't find an exact reference.
802.3ad is supported by all the smart switches, does that say anything?