Netgear GS108E-100NAS Prosafe Plus 8PORT Gigabit Ethernet Switch

Comment:
bought this switch to replace my old baystack 350 10/100 that i got from ebay. vlan are use from my vmware box (running my DC, streaming server, sip pbx, firewall/router) QoS is use for my sip softphone and hardphone.

Comment:
I began researching a couple new switches after my old switch (a Netgear GS608) began exhibiting stability problems. I had recently added more devices on the network streaming from the a NAS box and upgraded to a gigabit NIC in that machine. Under these new loads, the GS608 heat up considerably and became unstable under increased loads, dropping ports at times.This GS108E switch seemed to fit the bill, as I was interested in doing a bit of troubleshooting to eek a bit and additionally was drawn in by the QOS features on this switch. The ability to log on and LED Indication. The switch provided one piece of information I did not even know I needed. Many switches indicate No-link, 10/100 or 1000 Mbps with three modes of one LED; this switch indicates No-link, 10, 100, or 1000 by four modes of two alternating LEDs. As it turned out I had a bad cable connected to my laptop with the 100Mbps NIC, and it was only able to negotiate a 10Mbps connection. Changed the cable and voila, an order of magnitude improvement. The "cable test" feature of this through the utility also properly identified the problem when I used this now known bad cable to test that feature. One drawback I can see -- the lights are bright, possibly too bright if this is installed in an environment you want to keep dark.Port mirroring. Another feature I have only tinkered with so far with one interesting result. Playing with the mirroring function and some packet capture software, I quickly discovered one device on my network (a D-Link DIR-655 in Access Point mode) was creating all kinds of ARP packets. This is very small from a bandwidth point of view, but still may affect latency. At any rate, this is something that would have been much more difficult to discover without this feature and indicates it will certainly prove more useful in the future.QOS. Finally, this switch supports QOS both by port OR by tag. Another feature that I didn't know I needed until I had it. My gateway is working to move high priority packets on and off the internet, but as it turns out, my old switch was still providing a latency bottleneck. This revelation is supported by a little bit of common sense: all the traffic on my network goes through this central switch and if the high priority packets don't get to the gateway ahead of the others then the gateway won't have much of an affect. My internal network is moving loads of content around for media at times, and the "unmanaged" switch (used loosely as this GS108E is only "loosely managed" itself). From the point of view of the gamer, the switch was wasting time moving these internal packets around without hustling the gaming packets to the gateway and back. QOS on the switch solves that latency issue and the "media" packets do not suffer because of the buffering that is included on the playing devices.I'm very pleased.