Looking for a budget-friendly 10GbE switch compatible with 2.5GbE?
Looking for a budget-friendly 10GbE switch compatible with 2.5GbE?
The switch is not working properly, causing many transmission errors on the 10Gb ports. I need a reliable replacement that’s affordable, or I might have to upgrade to fiber if it’s too costly. My current plan is to move to a faster connection, but I’m concerned about the distance between points. The price is important—my monthly budget is around £50 for a symmetrical 3.2Gbps link. Ideally, you’d want something managed to simplify things.
Really, I should have mentioned I’m targeting managed, but that didn’t work. Good to know it’s helping you!
Goodbye, but I’ve got two of them running smoothly so far with the QNAP 322 router. It’s performing perfectly for me.
I strongly suggest checking out https://mikrotik.com/product/crs309_1g_8s_in. This model offers 8 SFP+, 1 Gbit Ethernet, L3 offloading features, and passive cooling. Just keep in mind that setting it up beyond basic home networking needs could be challenging unless you have some technical expertise. It functions well as a router, delivering around 4 Gbps with a fairly intricate configuration; only one CPU core runs at full capacity while the other stays idle, leaving room for better performance. Despite being a switch, it performs adequately. My main concerns are the ARM32 architecture instead of ARM64 (which limits container support) and the absence of USB/PCIe/NVMe ports (limiting container storage options). It also lacks hardware offloading for IPsec, a feature many marketed routers emphasize. In residential settings, mesh networks such as Tailscale, Zerotier, Wireguard, Cloudflare Zero Trust are popular, but IPsec offloading offers little benefit in those environments.
Notably, I previously relied on Ubiquiti, which shares a similar 8 SFP+ port (without 1 Gbit Ethernet) and offers comparable pricing. While it has a cleaner design and smoother interface, my experience showed that any simplification beyond a solid core often sacrifices hardware offloading. Mikrotik appears to handle this better. Additionally, Ubiquiti recommends using SFP+ 10G transceivers on no more than one port per switch due to thermal concerns; with Mikrotik, using 10G Ethernet across all ports is acceptable.