Review by A. B. Schaffer

Great 8-port switch. I’ve owned it for over a year and it remains just warm to the touch. I have several ports at a gig and several at 100FDX. I leave everything at autonegotiate. There were a couple times where I switched off autonegotiate on a port and a particular PC because of an intermittent link outage and I was suspecting a problem with the autonegotiate. But in the end, both times ended up being the same RJ-45 plug at the PC end of the 60 foot CAT-5 cable. After finally cutting it off and crimping on a new connector, my intermittent problem went away. This was one of my gig links. My system maxes out at 450 Mbps point-to-point so I can’t test at gig speeds. Inserting the switch did not make any difference which is good. One time, I configured three ports in two VLANs, (i.e. port 1 tagged to VLAN 2; port 2 untagged to default VLAN; port 3 tagged to VLAN 2 and a member of the default VLAN). I could not get it to work with my PCs but I believe my NICs were not working properly with VLAN tags because Wireshark on all three computers never showed me a tagged frame even when I ran straight cable between two PCs configured for tagged VLANs. In any event, while going through all these configuration changes on the switch, it never locked up or acted strangely. The unaffected ports outside my little VLAN test remained functional. So the only gripe I have with small devices like this is that they are too light. They are at the mercy of the weight of the cables plugged into them. They need lead in the bottom to hold them in place. Alrighty then.