TP-Link 8 Port Gigabit Ethernet Network Switch | Ethernet Splitter | Sturdy Metal w/ Shielded Ports | Plug-and-Play | Traffic Optimization | Unmanaged (TL-SG108)

Pros: Fast boot up time
Low-voltage power supply
Auto-sensing ports (a standard today)
9k Jumbo Frame support
Good power efficiency (less than 1 watt of power consumption with 2 active ports)
Faster than my other switches at establishing a connection.
Minimal packaging, there was no extra bloat and fanciness that I’m going to throw out anyway.
QoS Support

Cons: 5 year warranty (as opposed to lifetime)
I would have liked to see dual LED’s for a gigabit connection instead of one.

Overall Review: Since this is supposed to be a review from an eggxpert, I did my best to torture this switch to provide the most stressful testing I could. The best way I could think of doing that is by taking this to work and temporarily swap it for the current blue painted metal housed 8port professional grade unmanaged switch. I work at a university with a helpdesk that provides computer support to more than 20,000 undergrad and graduate students. Our helpdesk moves between 500GB and 2TB of data through our little blue 8port switch every day. From backing up data (music, pictures, documents, movies, programs and research data of all types) to our NAS then pulling new system images down during OS reinstall, our switch usually starts to work moving data at 8 a.m. and stops when we close up shop 13 hours later. I left this at work for a week before bringing it home for my own set of tests.

I ask all of our technicians to do their best to break this during daily use and it just never happened. All of them had very positive feedback on the switch and a few mentioned they saw improved performance over our aging solution.

For my set of tests, I set this switch up as part of a single and multi-switch network between a file-server, 3 desktops, laptop and router. files were moved between different machines at 10/100 and gigabit. At 10/100 all transfers had 99%+ network utilization and 91%+ throughput. Averaging 11.4 of 12.5MB/s. up and down stream. Gigabit tests were impressive too. Reading from the raid arrays (5x500GB and 3x1000GB) on the server yielded bursts above 200MB/s and average downloads between 80 and 90MB/s for files between 750MB and 2GB. When writing files back to the server there were a few very suspicious hang-ups, during the file transfers, but they couldn't be isolated to the switch, but in case you were wondering, most of the time I saw transfers around 65-80MB/s (writing to RAID 5 arrays), but the transfers on multiple occasions did dip to ~800KB/s.

Finally, there were no hangups with day to day Internet traffic, or video streaming. I would like to have tested it with some games, but I had to take a trip out of state during the review process and didn't have time.

In all if you can get this switch for a good price, don't hesitate to snap it up, it's a good buy. If you can find a switch with a lifetime warranty for the same price, it's the only thing I would recommend more than this.
This is the second TPLink product I have owned and I have been pretty satisfied with both.

Lastly, I rarely give out a 5/5 rating to a product, if this switch had a lifetime warranty, it probably would have earned it, because I like a company that will stand behind a product enough to say that I will only have to buy it once.

Pros: First impressions (before powering up and setting up):
Can be wall mounted / desktop situated.

This switch is more than over-kill for a regular home network… however I do like the fact that it is very energy efficient (shuts off ports that aren’t active, adjusts power based on cable length).

Use:
It’s a fanless switch so it will stay quiet forever!!!

Other:
Comes with useful layer 2 features:
IGMP Snooping V1/V2/V3
Link Aggregation
Port Mirroring
Cable Diagnostics
Loop Prevention
MTU/Port/Tag VLAN
QoS
Support Port-based/802.1p priority
Support 4 priority queues
Rate Limit
Storm Control

Cons: Powering up and setting up:
Plug it in and let it rip. It’s default IP address is 192.168.0.1. Configuration is done via the Easy Smart Configuration utility ONLY… that’s a huge disappointment. Whenever you try to navigate to the switch via the Web UI… nothing loads. Not sure if I got a bunk switch (tried several browsers)… but it doesn’t have a “web-based user interface” like it’s description states.

Use:
No Web UI or firmware updates… already a legacy device????

Overall Review: Packaging and Un-boxing:
The TP-LINK TL-SG105E ships in a thin cardboard box, wrapped in plastic and cradled by foam. It comes with the following items:

TP-LINK TL-SG1016DE 5-Port Gigabit Easy Smart Switch
Power cord
Rubber “feet”
Installation Guide
Resource CD

Wrap-Up:
Affordable layer-2 switch with decent feature set… just wish it had a Web UI.