Anybody see a 48 port managed 2.5 Gig ethernet switch for reasonable pricing yet? it seems like these are still either thousands of dollars or sold for chinese market without appropriate certificatiosn to be plugged into the north american electric grid. Any help would be appreciated (even better if it has 2-4 SFP+ 10 gig ports on it)
2.5 is still really new in the networking space and nobody has hit economies of scale yet. I very much also want to build out my home LAN to be entirely 2.5g compatible since 1g is limiting for my NAS use case (video storage), 10g is overkill and not supported by my client devices, and I only need 16/24 ports. but good God the hardware just isn’t reasonable yet.
You pretty much have to bite the bullet if you really want 2.5 right now. What might honestly be worthwhile is finding a used enterprise 1g switch with the number of ports you need, and will still be “enough”, as those can be had for only a couple hundred dollars. Sit on that for 2-3 years until the 2.5g and 5g hardware market starts to fill out and you can decide how badly you need 2.5g then
Yeah I would also suggest to stick with 1g switches and if the need for bandwidth is required then create a LAG. 2.5g is currently just finding adoption at this point.
Oh yeah that’s a good idea too. Sure any one client device will be limited to 1g but your NAS could use a super cheap multi-port ethernet card to get 2 or 4g bonded link speeds so it can serve multiple devices at full speed.
2.5 and 5 gig are also very much consumer grade speeds, and you don’t really find 48 port consumer grade switches. Enterprises largely don’t give a shit about 2.5 and 5 so there’s no demand to make something like that.
Yea, I think 2.5G is really searching for a market, that may not exist. For home use, 1Gbit is in general plenty fast enough, and maxes out most US customers Internet too. For enterprise use 10G is common and cheap. The cards to get an SFP+ port into any tower or server is just really small. Enterprise is considering how to do 100G core cheaply enough, and looking for at least 25G on performance servers, if not also 100G in some cases. If you’ve got the budget you can roll 400G core right now in “not insane pricing”.
2.5G to the generic office (that might well be remote) is likely re-wiring and unnecessary. And that’s if you don’t find ac WiFi sufficient, i.e. sub 1G.
The biggest up side to 2.5 gig and 5 gig is that they can do their speeds on existing cat 5e and cat 6 cables at their full 100 meters. And I think 2.5 gig poe is dirt cheap. Outside of reusing existing cables WiFi 6 and 6e APs are their only real use since they can peak just over 1 gbit speeds.
I will have to see that. I would be concerned about pushing cat5e that fast. I am not sure about cat6, but again that speed is not fast enough to buy new cards for the computers and if we were buying cards I guess the 10G fiber cards are likely cost competitive now that servers are dumping them as obsolete.
In terms of value old 10 gig is much better than new 5 gig and even 2.5. It’s just most 10 gig stuff has crazy loud fans and use a ton of power.
Noise doesn’t matter in a data center which is where the switches live. The power use might be more than a 1gbit, but they’re in line with any dual power enterprise switch really.