Lowest price for a 2.5G switch with standard Ethernet, excluding SFP modules.
Lowest price for a 2.5G switch with standard Ethernet, excluding SFP modules.
I’m not convinced by what you’re saying. It wasn’t until I turned on flow control on a Netgear MS510TXPP that the issue appeared. Both devices use Intel chipsets, and the problem showed up right away when I tried to send data from my 10Gbit NAS to a slower client. QNAP reported it as an unexpected occurrence. Most of my NAS storage is slow now, but even those can reach 220MB/s consistently, making gigabit speeds a real limitation. Back then, the USB 5Gbit NIC was the main bottleneck—it only handled about 3.5Gbit, matching the chipset QNAP sells for upgrading NAS devices. I’d love to see the results if someone installed an unmanaged multi-gig switch, but I remain doubtful they wouldn’t face similar performance issues.
I lack experience with speeds above 1G, making it difficult to predict here... But if I had to, I believe both ends should agree on the highest speeds each can support and choose the lower one. So in theory, there shouldn't be any variation in performance. I spoke with my IT team, who confirmed there would be no problems. Perhaps you encountered some unexpected issue? I just hope it’s just that I might end up choosing the QNAP switch, if I manage to connect my PC directly (cable layout challenges). I’d appreciate knowing what happens then. It could take some time since I’d need to purchase three expansion cards for the router, server, and my PC.
Devices communicate with the switch and send data as quickly as the connection allows. The way this data is managed depends on the protocol (like TCP or UDP) you're using, and if not, packets may be discarded when the buffer fills up. This is similar to how the Internet works—your computer doesn’t care about the slowest link; congestion control aims to prevent packet loss. When flow control is enabled, the switch sends pause frames back to the faster network card, stopping traffic before it can be dropped. I encountered issues with data dropping on my NAS using NFS, Samba, or iperf3, especially over a Gigabit connection. After fixing flow control, the problem disappeared. It might help to enable it directly on the network cards instead of adjusting the switch settings.
Most switches offering 2.5Gbps or higher at reasonable costs have already been discussed. QNap QSW-1105-5T: Five 2.5Gbps ports ZyXEL XGS1010-12: Eight 1Gbps ports Two 2.5Gbps ports Two 10Gbps ports (SFP+) Netgear GS110MX: Eight 1Gbps ports Two 10Gbps ports (RJ-45) Netgear SX10 (GS810EMX): Eight 1Gbps ports Two 10Gbps ports (RJ-45)
It's a bit disappointing to see affordable options like 2.5Gbps Ethernet NICs available on eBay, yet full switches remain quite costly. In fact, I recently purchased an Odroid H2+ with two 2.5Gbps Realtek NICs, and it wasn't the expensive NICs that made up the bulk of the price in that build.
It appears odd since Realtek seems to have launched their 2.5Gbit switch SoC alongside their NIC ICs, yet only a handful of suppliers have chosen the latter.
Yeah, you're right. That has more sense. Flow control is enabled on that switch so I assume that's what QNAP meant when they said it shouldn't give any issues. I finally found a way to connect my PC directly to the switch (now there's another one that sits between) so I have to wait for the payout from latest job and here we go with testing. Thanks for the summary I did mostly found them by myself and it's a shame that there's so little devices to choose from. Similar thing with 10G. NICs are so much cheaper and much easier to get on ebay then finding some switch to work with that. I've seen that H2+ - awesome device. I was almost angry that I didn't find it before I built pfSense router a month ago. The 'almost' part comes only from the fact that I have i3, which means more power and FreeBSD works better with Intel's NICs.
I considered adding pfSense to a VM environment (server with J1900 running Archlinux). However, I noticed a possible performance decrease. Adding sufficient NICs could be challenging, and the router in this configuration relies heavily on host stability—something I wanted to avoid. Also, FreeBSD doesn’t seem to handle those NICs well; it might not even support them properly. While there are unofficial patches for 2.5G and 5G NICs, no official support exists yet. I’m aware there’s ongoing development for I225 chips, but I have no idea when it will be available.