Number of Ports: You can get anywhere from four all the way up to 48 or more Ethernet ports. Some also have USB ports. the other 7 ports as outputs. Each of the 8 Ethernet ports are Auto-negotiating. That means you do nothing but When it comes to 8-port network switches for the home or small office network, it’s hard to beat the TP-Link TL-SG108. It’s compact, has a fanless metal enclosure, plus dimmer-and-less-distracting LEDs than some of its competitors (Don’t worry; there are still two per port, each informative based on color and/or blinking pattern). The TL-SG108 also features traffic-prioritizing QoS, full duplex flow control, auto-negotiating ports for choosing transfer speed up to a gigabit, and simple, plug-and-play setup. This best network switch performed at rough parity with other 8-port switches we tested and ran cool.

This switch supplants our previous choice for best 5-port switch, the QNAP QSW 1105-5T, for a few reasons. First, the TP-Link just has a bigger pipe for data, pushing a consistent 2.34 Gbps where the QNAP, in our testing, only barely got over 2 Gbps in real world use. It also has a slightly more space-friendly form factor. And perhaps most importantly, where the QNAP’s warranty ends at 2 years, the TP-Link TL-SG105-M2 falls in the company’s business class of switches, giving it a generous limited lifetime warranty. Lastly, the TL-SG105-M2 sports QoS - a feature typical of most unmanaged switches that is conspicuously absent on the QSW 1105-5T. I only had to furnish six Ethernet cables and off they went. They are able to play on line games using the switch and I have heard of no problems so far. Well, except for a tangle of Ethernet cables. Watch your step in the living Power Needs: Most won't need it, but certain devices can get power over Ethernet if your switch supports it. on-line. They had been using the Wi-Fi but it is slow and unreliable, in our household, and bandwidth was at a

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Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. you want to play administrator with your home/office network. (This is not a review of a highly technical nature

In between 8-and-16-port switches, you have some funky units like this ZyXel XGS1010-12. It’s billed on the box as a desktop switch with 8 gigabit ports and four bonus ports in the form of two 2.5 GbE and two 10 GbE SFT+ uplink ports. The latter fiber Internet customers would recognize as the data port on a fiber ONT (Optical Network Terminator -- think of it like a Fiber modem for customers without last-mile copper). Per-port lights made it obvious which ports run at 2.5 gigabit, 1 gigabit, and 100 megabit. I loved the fan-less design - zero noise coming from these TP-Link switches. I will never buy a fan-based switch again - they collect dust, and eventually die unless kept clean.When you set up the switch box you use one of the 8 ports to take the Ethernet cable from the router and use I looked at the Configuration Utility software, after installation, to see what information would be available. This is

Along with its 8-port sibling - the TL-SG108-M2 - the TL-SG105-M2 is low-profile, easy to set up, and features a fanless design and metal enclosure that will keep it as quiet as it is fast. And because it’s a 2.5 GbE switch, you might not need to buy new cabling; as long as you’re already using Cat 5e cabling in your network, you’re good to take advantage of the 802.3bz network protocol, which promises 2.5 GbE or 5 GbE connections over 100 meters of cable. In testing, this bore out, with super fast file transfers that didn’t even blink when we loaded the network down with as much traffic as we could muster. The switch ran a little warm though, topping out at about 115 degrees Fahrenheit. in the next room. (The entire length from the router to the switch should be less than 328 feet). That's one port

premium. I decided to buy a switch so all the friends could tap into the TP-Link switch and use the fiber optics Of course, you needn’t have a connection that fast to get use out of one of the recent 2.5 GbE network switches. File transfers, home media servers, and high-capacity, high-bandwidth NAS setups can all stand to benefit from a high-bandwidth switch, and as they come out, we’ll try to put our hands to the latest and greatest to let you know how they fare. That brings us, today, to the TP-Link TL-SG105-M2: a super fast unmanaged 5-port, 2.5 GbE switch that, while bigger than your average 5-port gigabit switches, should still fit into just about anyone’s setup - and budget, for that matter.