Am thinking of purchasing a 24 port switch and there is a whole range of prices for them. Is there a real difference or no? I'm just trying to clean up my network, which has grown into several small switches plugged into a load balancer.
I'm in the same boat you are. Please let me know what your experience is and I'll do likewise. I seem to be finding good product availability and prices at NewEgg. I'm thinking 30+ ports.
I picked up a 16 port gig switch from Dell (PowerConnect 2716) a couple of years ago at a good price. It does the job. Any switch should be fine, if you want one that you can manage you will pay a premium price because those are geared towards corporate users. If you can live without those features you will save a lot of money with an unmanaged switch. The Dell switch I have has a web interface to manage it but it isn't doesn't follow standards so it wouldn't play well in an enterprise environment (where everything needs to be centrally managed)
Yes, I gather that the pricey switches are enterprise level, where buyers care mostly about centralized reporting and control over thousands of ports. Doesn't seem to make sense for someone who only needs 20 to 40 ports. Seems like any decent brand unmanaged switch is going to do the trick.
Dang, what are you guys stringing together that requires so many ports? I've got two machines, each on their own hardware firewall, one is business and one is surfing. I have a six port switch and am only using three so far.. I guess I'm not having as much fun as I should be maybe.. :eek:
Besides a variety of computers, I have IP camera's (Axis), IP thermostats (Proliphix), a DVR (Tivo), network printers, a couple of NAS devices (TeraStations) and some other misc stuff on the network.