Which 5 port switch would you pick?

[mc866]

I currently have a D-Link DI-624 and other D-Link products and have had good luck so I am kind of partial to them, but would be open to suggestions.

I'm looking for a 5 port gigabit switch, nothing too fancy but that will get me by. I have picked these out as options. Which would you use?

I'm leaning towards this because it looks to be the most feature rich for the price:
DGS-1005D

Also these:
DGS-2205
DGS-105

 

[Muscles]

For consumer networking products I also prefer dlink over everything else. I'm sure the one you're leaning towards will be fine.

 

[Madwand1]

If you're not going to use jumbo frames, they should all be fine. If you want to use jumbo frames, you need to be careful -- with any line. The minimum HW revision for jumbo frame support is C3, and my rev C3 DGS-1008D has poorer performance with jumbo frames than without (pretty much defeating the purpose of having jumbo frames). There's at least one other revision -- C4; I don't know if it fixed the issue (but I have doubts).

There are lots of rev. C1 and even rev. B1 in the field. The revision is printed on the box.

Rev. C1 and C3 both had fine performance without jumbo frames enabled.

The DGS-100xD series is being replaced by the DGS-220x series, but isn't available everywhere.

I since got a Netgear GS608 revision 2!, and it performs well with both jumbo frames enabled and disabled. Rev. 1 is still in the field and doesn't support jumbo frames. Rev 2 mention jumbo frames on the box.

 

[mc866]

Could you explain the benefits of using jumbo frames? I guess I'm not that familiar with it. Also what kind of bandwidth will I see not using jumbo frames?

 

[mc866]

Also another quick question, do all PC's have to be connected to the switch to benefit from the increased bandwidth, or eventually when I upgrade to a 'N' gigabit router, if one PC is connected directly to the router and not the switch will it be able to take advantage of the gigabit speed from PC to PC?

 

[Madwand1]

Unless you're using old/slow CPUs, gigE cards on the PCI bus, and fast drives / RAID arrays, the performance benefits from using jumbo frames are probably not worth the hassle. Using jumbo frames can reduce the CPU utilization, which is a side-effect that might matter in itself, and one which can also impact file transfer performance directly sometimes.

But most GbE file transfers are bottlenecked by HD speed on either side.

It's hard to give general guidelines as to the extent performance benefits with/without jumbo frames, as this varies a lot depending on the details. With modern networking gear; good on-board/PCie GbE and modern CPUs, I wouldn't worry about the performance difference.

GbE routers typically don't support jumbo frames. Other than that, for a home scenario, there should be no serious issue with some devices being connected to the router and some to the switch. They'd have to go through the switch-router connection in addition, but this should be fast enough and not loaded enough with typical home use scenarios to matter much. 8-port switches aren't much more expensive though, so if you're considering increased usage down the road, starting with one of these may make more sense. Note that you lose one port connecting to router.

 

[mc866]

Thanks for all the clarification Madwand1!