THE BEST WAY TO UPGRADE TO GIGABIT AT HOME (Netgear GS105)

Member Name: monkey_daz

Product:	Netgear GS105
Date:	12/07/09 (55 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable, stable gigabit connection, build quality is excellent.

Disadvantages: Expensive, 5 ports means only 4 computers in most cases, runs hot.

This is the smallest (in terms of port numbers) Gigabit switch that Netgear make. The first thing that you notice about it when you open the box is that it has an extremely high build quality and has a good weight to it. This sort of thing is always reassuring. The metal box not only means it is stronger but will also help to get rid of the heat faster. This switch does run quite hot, but never overheats so I'm not so worried about danger rather that it might be using a fair bit of electricity!

It has 5 ports so for most people that means you will be able to have a Gigabit network between 4 computers since you will need to use one of the ports for uplinking to your router or other network. This isn't a problem unless you buy it thinking 5 ports = 5 computers, it depends on your setup and you would have to consider getting the 8 port one which is twice the price. These are currently retailing for about £40.

The speed performance is very good, but of course you won't actually get Gigabit transfer speed when copying files over your network. That depends on how good your computers are and their network cards. I have found that you get much faster transfer speeds by doing all the copying and pasting (if your using windows file sharing like me) from the faster computer of the two you are copying between. Going from a 4 year old PC to a 8 year old PC I still got transfer speeds of about 250Mbps which is pretty good going! Between two 4 year old PC's I got about 300-400Mbps which is very impressive too.

Basically if you are thinking of upgrading your network to Gigabit and don't have many computers you might as well get this because it should last for many, many years. The ProSafe series are used by lots of businesses but it's good that they make smaller models like this.

Summary: This is a very reliable switch which will just do what it is supposed to with no problems.