Are All Unmanaged Switches the Same?

There are so many unmanaged switches out there to choose from. I want to get a Gigabit ethernet switch for my home network.

Are they all the same? Does the SWITCH truly achieve Gigabit speeds or do some switches say they do but really don't?

A quick test on my $15 switch gets me 935Mbps between two clients. With some tweaking I could probably get closer to 1Gbps but I haven't bothered. Note that due to protocol overhead you'll never get exactly 1Gbps of data throughput.

If you have many clients simultaneously sending gigabits of data then I imagine these low-end switches will start hitting buffer size limitations. But for home usage I doubt you'll have any issues.

You are awesome. Thanks for the info. I was wondering if there was a truly a difference between the $80 and the $20 Gigabit unmanaged switches. I only have 4 computers, 2 ipads, and a few other items that is going through the switch so I was worried that a $20 switch (that says its gigabit ready) would become one of the bottlenecks for a gigabit ethernet home network. I just bought a top of the line router, cat7 cables, and gigabit capable NAS so the switch was one of things I was worried about. The NAS has movies and other media that would make a gigabit internal network awesome.

By the way, do you know if one computer would slow down the entire Gigabit network? In other words, 3 of my computers have network adapters that are gigabit capable but one computer is not. Would that one computer slow down the entire network? I heard for wireless, one wifi device could possibly slow everyone else down so wondering if one comp could slow down an entire wired network.

PolarNettles said:

A quick test on my $15 switch gets me 935Mbps between two clients. With some tweaking I could probably get closer to 1Gbps but I haven't bothered. Note that due to protocol overhead you'll never get exactly 1Gbps of data throughput.

If you have many clients simultaneously sending gigabits of data then I imagine these low-end switches will start hitting buffer size limitations. But for home usage I doubt you'll have any issues.

A managed switch seems to be a little too much for me. I don't think I have the competency to set it up. I also don't want to take too much of my time, trying to figure it out.

For copying, have you tried some of the 3rd party programs like FastCopy to transfer files? They really make a big difference. You set the buffer low for a lot of small files and then set the buffer high for transferring things like movies that are a few gigs each.

sml156 said:

A couple of years ago I bought a 8 port gigabit TP-Link tl-SG1008d dumb UN-managed switch for about $40, It was not too long after that I wished I had of spent the extra $30 or $40 and got a managed switch.

My network has grown since I bought it and also having the ability to create vlans or port mirroring would of come in handy.

EDIT:

I also get close to 1000 Mb/s when transferring files between computers as long as they are compressed, 100's or 1000's of uncompressed files transfer painfully slow.