NETGEAR 16 Port Gigabit Smart Switch w/ 2 Combo ports - Lifetime Warranty (GS716T) NETGEAR 16 Port Gigabit Smart Switch w/ 2 Combo ports - Lifetime Warranty (GS716T)

Pros: more than enough for your basic office and has some cool features should you have an onsite techy ;)

lifetime warranty its a huge plus and this new 27x7 for 1 year was a nice surprise.

comes with rack mounting or wall mounting brackets

Cons: none, i mean i wouldn't pay the retail pricing that newegg list of $250. if you can get it for under $200, its a deal

Other Thoughts: I've used Netgear at all my clients office, from small 8 port gig switches to the 48 port. Webgui has gotten better throughout the years as well as their detection software.

netgear fits good in the middle pack.

Pros: It's an excellent product all around. I needed a solution that would allow more gigabit devices on my LAN. This does it all and it's very fast. It's also offers a high level of customization, but to be honest I'm not utilizing much of it.

Cons: N/A

Other Thoughts: It's nice that you can very quickly and easily identify the speed at which the device has connected for debugging purposes. It does also have an extensive UI. It is also rack mountable via included hardware.

Pros: See previous review

Cons: See Previous review

Other Thoughts: After chasing after Netgear support, I left my original review below. Well, they seem to monitor the reviews because I had someone call me back a few days after posting this negative review. The tech was knowledgeable and make 4 attemps to call me!
He spent a good 30 minutes going over the configuration of the switch to make sure I had not done anything bad, and finally understood that this switch only does IGMP Snooping in the sense that it can forward all the IGMP packets to a server. That's not quite the standard IGMP snooping I'm used to...
Netgear recommended a fully managed switch for what I need.
5 minutes with Newegg Support Chat, and I'm waiting for my prepaid return label and refund.
Too bad that it took a bad review for Netgear to clean up their act, but they definitely made up for it after.
Newegg's act is as good as usual.

Pros: Cheap gigabit switch

Cons: Specs claim it supports IGMP snooping, which is the main reason I purchased it (besides gigabit). Well, it does not work. Spent hours with Netgear "advanced" support on the phone to explain them how IGMP snooping should work, and how it does not work on this switch.
May keep it just as a cheap gigabit switch, but buyers beware...

Other Thoughts: Apparently this unit ships as GS716T v2. Netgear support confirmed that this is indeed the NETGEAR ProSafe GS716T-200NAS. Not very evident from the name since I know that the GS716T does not support IGMP snooping...

Pros: Smart switch. Port mirroring, tons of features.

Cons: Passes password for the switch in clear text.

Other Thoughts: The fan noise is not an issues for me since the switch is in the basement corner and out of the way.

On a whole it works as intended but there a some real issues with this.

1. The password to log into the web interface is clear text. Snort picked it up and sure enough there's the password. So no real need to change the default password.

2. The switch will lock up. Not sure why. But sometimes I have to physically unplug the switch.

3. There were times when the switch no longer passed any DHCP client requests. This was really annoying. Sometimes a reboot would help, but at times I would have to set it back to factory defaults. What a PIA that is.

When I get frustrated enough I'll move on and get a better switch.

For the money I think it could be better.

Pros: It's probably a nice switch.

Cons: It has a fan.
Netgear's website EXPLICITLY states:
"Fan-less design for quiet operation"
"Acoustic Noise Level: 0dBA"

Other Thoughts: I Bought this switch brown-boxed (i.e. in commercial packaging, which has no information other then the part number on it) at Fr-y's based on the description on Netgear's website. It was going to go in my home/lab lan, which is primarily in my bedroom.

I open the box, and it has a little, tiny, whiny 40mm fan.

One of the major factors in my choice was the silent operation. Unfortunately, Netgear LIES on their website. Now I have to drive 45 minutes back to fry-s to return the switch, so I can buy a D-Link replacement which might actually have the characteristics it advertises.

Pros: The price, NewEgg delivery speed, multiple LEDs for complete status of each port, tons of features. You'd have to more than double the price of this switch to get as many goodies under the hood.

Cons: Implementation of 802.1q has a few idiosyncrasies (limited to very few VLANs), management is *only* via www. These aren't really deal breakers as long as you remember: this is not an enterprise switch, it's a workgroup or lab environment switch for a real geek. There are two fans on the right side of the switch that pull hot air out and the intake is on the left. (this is more efficient than pushing cold air in, and I'm amazed that only Netgear has figured that out.) Unfortunately, the fans are noisy. There is also noticeable beeding (that's when two fans are almost the same speed but not quite, and the "womp womp womp" sound makes you think there's a diesel truck idling outside. And it's fluctuating (fast and slow and fast again, so you can't even get used to it.)

Other Thoughts: Down from 5 to 4 eggs despite the awesome price b/c enterprise features aren't fully implemented. It's an EXCELLENT workgroup or a lab switch. Excellent sustained throughput. Maybe a future firmware update will upgrade?

Before you purchase, consider the fan noise.

I read all of the older reviews, some said it was noisy, others played down the fan noise. Because I really wanted to take advantage of this incredible price, I chose to believe the "low fan noise" reviews and not heed the "it is noisy" warnings. That was a mistake.

The fans are loud, not datacenter loud, but they're definitely too loud for a living room or a work area. If you do music, forget this switch. The noise level from these two 4cm fans is easily worse than a 5 yr old PC with worn bearing fans and caked on dust.

If you put this in a closet, you'll be fine. If it's going to be out in the open find something else.

Unfortunately, silence is a requirement for me - I live in a studio apartment.

Pros: FAST! 16 Gigabit ports, plus 2 Fiber ports, small form factor

Cons: I'm not giving newegg or netgear or the switch a dig on the eggs for this, because It very well could just be my switch, since I bought it used (not on new egg) but it HOWLS like a beast. see comments in other thoughts.

It's also not a Cisco Catalyst switch.

Other Thoughts: I bought mine from a company going out of business, so I only paid 80$ for it, but as soon as I plugged it in, the fans made a ton of noise. I've since disconnected both, and am looking for either 2 silent replacement fans, or am going to upgrade the passive cooling inside and just run it silent. Overall it's an awesome switch, and for the money I couldn't resist.

Pros: Low priced gigabit switch that provides most of the basic switch management features.

Cons: No console connection. No command line or telnet interface. Only a web interface that caused quite a few headaches with my setup. After contacting Netgear tech support and being told that I would have to return the switch I finally found that the proxy settings (in addition to the security settings) of IE7 prevented proper operation. It works fine now. Also, some fan noise.

Other Thoughts: I cannot connect gigabit on my Vista Ultimate PC which I initially blamed on the switch, then on the NIC. After swapping ports, NIC's and drivers among PC's I have now found that it is Vista that will not support gigabit (I tried three different gig adapters):(

A google search shows I am not alone...

Pros: This switch does 90% of what much more expensive managed L2 switches do, at a fraction of the price. And unlike some other cheap managed switches, the web GUI on this one works great with IE7 and Mozilla 2.0.

802.1Q VLAN seems to work great and supports VLAN ID's 1-4094. The port-based (non-Q) VLAN config does half a crippled config as previously described, but who uses that anyway.

Cons: No CLI or console interface, but at it is configurable via SNMP.

No syslog, but it does support sending SNMP traps.

There is some noticeable fan noise. It doesn't sound like a jet engine like a 1U server. The noise seems to be caused by resonance between the two fans, not either fan on its own.