Yes, 10/100 switches can be a good investment for your home, offering flexibility and control over lighting setups.
Yes, 10/100 switches can be a good investment for your home, offering flexibility and control over lighting setups.
Do you know if switches with just 10/100 speeds make sense for a home lab setup? You mentioned the HP Procurve 2610-48, which only offers 10/100 on most ports except two that support 10/100/1000. The advantages are many Layer 3 managed ports, but the downsides include limited link speeds. You're weighing options like using two of them with redundancy and a POE Unifi switch versus investing in a full 48-port PoE switch with 1000Mbps ports. Your goal is to get enterprise features without overspending, aiming for L3 support and advanced VLANs/routing. You also plan to add a PLEX server, domain controller, and storage server, possibly using a cache server for Steam.
It really varies based on your needs. For basic learning or simple CLI tasks, it should function well. With PLEX, storage and cache servers you'll hit the 100Mbps limit, so upgrading to a 1Gbps switch would be advantageous. For L3 switches with many ports, 10/100 vs 10/100/1000 matters. Unmanaged switches usually cost similarly whether 100Mb or 1Gb, making it a worthwhile investment. I own a 10Gb switch at home because my high-performance storage server takes full advantage of it.
100 Megabytes network speed is 800 Megabits broadband speed, so it's got some life left in it. People on faster connections will disagree. Whether it's fast enough for disk writes between node on a network is another thing. Top end HDDs write at around 150MB/s to 200MB/s, so...
We refer to network equipment in terms of megabits, not megabytes. A 10/100 switch transmits 100 megabits, not 100 megabytes each second.