FINALLY! CHEAP 10GbE and 2.5GbE Switches for the Homelab or Office

what if you could find a two and a half gig ethernet switch that also had 10 gigabit Ethernet it was fanless so that means it was quiet it was low power and best of all what if that same switch was super cheap and in some cases like crazy super cheap well that's what we're looking at today so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from sth Recently we published a two and a half gig switch guide we called it the ultimate guide but we actually had a couple of units that were inbound or in the process of being tested that just didn't make it to that guide and some of those were shown here these four switches represent different brands of what are essentially the same switches the first one that we got is this one that came from a company called hiracha or however you would say this the second one we have is from mocher link over here on this side we have a fancy Nick Giga as well as a sodola the prices on these switches range from about 95 although I know folks have gotten some of these for a lot less than that and then up to about 120 526 dollars so that's the range of pricing that we're talking about and that depends a little bit on like where you're shopping and what have you now in our review we're gonna mainly focus on the hiracha or however you would say that as well as the mocher link ones because those are the first two that we received and also they are the ones that are kind of like the top and bottom pricing we've taken the time to figure out how these switches work and we can confirm that they're all basically the same inside but just to do that I want to go through and just kind of show you guys some unboxing then we're gonna go through the hardware really quickly I'm going to show you the diagram that we've been able to come up with on how these things work or at least how we think they work we're then going to talk about the awesome power consumption the pretty good performance and then I want to get to our key Lessons Learned we're going to talk a little bit about buying these to make sure that you get the right unit and then I want to talk about one hiccup that we had they just think everybody should be aware of so do not skip our key Lessons Learned and hey I just want to say thank you to all the sth YouTube members for helping fund us buying these units so we can go and test them out and see how they work and report back if you do want to help us so we can go buy more units and find new things in the future well you can click down below there's a little join feature and they'll be super appreciated if you could with that let's do a side-by-side unboxing [Music] okay so the first thing I want to do is set up the overhead cam and I wanted to go through these two units um we have the mocha link over here and then we have this one which is from AliExpress called uh from a company called uh Hora ciao horacho I don't I don't I don't exactly know how to say this if anybody has any ideas how to say this feel free to go put that in the description I just have no idea I even put this into Google Translate to see if like you know what it meant or something like that and uh didn't have anything so uh anyway I just kind of want to to take a look at these and show you these side by side so the first thing you're going to notice is that even down to like the box dimensions the flaps I mean these things are almost exactly the same it's almost like the mochrolink uh just you know had had some branding put onto the same box but uh when you open them up um over here on the mocher link side we have a quick start guide the one that we have over here for the oracho is not as big but you're gonna see that these things actually have the exact same uh hopefully you can see this they have the same like switch family that are right next to each other so I thought that was kind of interesting okay now those are done uh same little piece of foam that is uh sitting on top of these units and then we get something that is very similar you will notice that um Brian did take these out to go and photograph them so the the packaging is not perfect but uh anyway you guys will see the the point of this so first thing uh power adapters we have the mocher link over here and we have the Chow one over here so you're gonna see that we have these two network adapters and uh this one is the mochrolink one this is the huaracho one and uh and you know they're both the exact same units they're 12 volt 2 Amp little ball watch you can see that these things are exactly the same and then in terms of the foam insert they're the same we got the same packaging here these switches are very similar you guys are going to see the package is almost exactly the same the reason I wanted to show you this packaging by the way is because I wanted to make sure that folks know that these switch whatever switches these are are getting rebranded like crazy and there are different options in terms of where you can buy them based on which brand you get now I hate doing unboxing videos but hopefully you guys will have seen through this process that these switches are basically identical and they probably came off the exact same line they're just branded differently and just to be complete I wanted to just point out real quick that even though this has a different face plate on the sedola and then also the Nick Giga has a different looking box and all that kind of stuff these are are the exact same boxes inside the Nick Giga probably has the fanciest looking box because it actually is not just a simple brown box and the sedola one was going to be a nice box to show off however that one came with an Amazon shipping label on it that ended up destroying the box so uh it doesn't really look good for the camera but if you can't tell these boxes are all the same size and inside you have the same foam inserts and what have you with that let's get to the hardware [Music] okay now that we've unboxed these units and we've established that they've probably come off of the exact same line let's kind of get into the actual Hardware there's really not that much here so the first thing you're going to see on the front of the switch is that we have a total of eight two and a half gig ethernet ports there's also one 10 gigabit Ethernet port which is an SFP Plus Port and that's over here what that means on the switch is that if you are using this as an Uplink or something like that you have about two times the downstream bandwidth as you have Upstream bandwidth which is not actually that much of an over subscription at all but the other really cool thing is that you can do something like you could have a Nas or a workstation attached to the 10 gig and then you can have other devices attached to the two and a half gig I also do want to point out that we just did a piece on the Asus store flash store 6 which has two two and a half gig ethernet ports and you can use SMB multi-channel so smb3 multi-channel and you can get you know an aggregate of two two and a half gig ports off of like that Nas Just on this Cheapo switch and that brings us to something that I just really want to get off my chest here which is a lot of folks uh whenever we do these two and a half gigs I think it's s like you know why do two and a half gig why not do 10 gig all that kind of stuff let me give you just an easy answer so the reason that we have two and a half gig ethernet is simple one devices are using two and a half gig usernames so you don't want to be plugging them into one gig ethernet switches anymore to get full bandwidth two two and a half gig ethernet is simply two and a half times the speed of one gig ethernet and three you want to continue to reuse all the existing wiring in buildings and that's super uh you know super valuable and that's exactly what two and a half gig ethernet is designed to do and at least this switch has one and 10 gig ethernet port okay now I will get off my soapbox and let's get back to the hardware on both sides we have vents on the top it's just flat I don't really know what to tell you on the bottom we have this little this little mounting uh bits here we didn't get rubber feet I wish we had a little rubber feet on this but the other thing I just want to point out is that there are no like rack Mounting Solutions for this that are easy uh you're gonna have to go and get a shelf and make your own one thing that we do not get it with the switch is a retention mechanism so you know if you have like your 12 volt in over here uh you know and somebody just hits the cable it's just gonna pop out you'll see that a lot of other switches have a little retention mechanism just to be able to keep this in and up and prevent that from taking down a network so you notice that the stickers on the two of these is a little bit different so you're not going to have something like a management IP and login like we see on some of the low-cost manage switches okay now opening up the switch takes four screws and once we're inside this is a different layout than I think a lot of folks would expect but let's kind of go through the highlights here um first things that you'll notice that there are no fans so this is a fanless switch which is awesome I think everybody loves that okay so looking inside the switch you're going to see that we have two heatsinks now these seats sinks are stuck on there really tightly and I didn't want to break these units because it takes a long time sometimes to get especially the ones from like AliExpress and you know we just don't want to waste money but here's a diagram of what we think is going on inside inside the switch there's a real Tech RTL 8244cg and that is powering four of the two and a half gig ethernet ports then there's a 10 gig link that's going over to the RTL 8373cg and that 10 gig link is enough because you know you have two and a half gig links right so that's that kind of gives you your you know four two and a half gig equals 10 and then you get a 10 gig Uplink to the RTL 8373cg you know that one goes up to the four two and a half gig links here and then also has the other SFP plus 10 gig link so it's kind of a weird solution but it seems to work and I just also point out that when you're inside you'll notice that you do have these labels and these are all the exact same I mean the pcbs that came in all these are the exact same the sheet metal is almost exactly the same and so I just want to point out that all these things are you know as far as I'm concerned they're the same but it's really just isn't that much going on in this little switch still it's a low-cost unmanaged switch so the fact that it even just has a metal case is nice I don't really expect that much in this price range okay so let's talk about power consumption and first let's talk about the power adapters and just the units themselves something that you're going to notice is that they have the exact same 12 volt 2 amp power adapters but um but there are a couple things that are worth pointing out the first one is just the fact that there are no like UL there's no FCC like none of those types of markings on there there is a CE marking but there's aren't a lot of markings that you would see on kind of like some higher end switches or at least switches from kind of more well-known vendors I guess and for a lot of businesses the fact that these do not have those regulatory markings means that you just can't use them the other kind of fun thing is that uh even though we call this a power adapter the translation apparently I got that a little bit mixed up because this is the adapter power but fun translation quirks aside let's just talk about the power of these units and we tested these things back to back side by side and we use the exact same little power meter that we used on all of the rest of the two and a half gig ethernet switches that we did and what we found is that at idle when nothing's plugged in these switches use only one point 6 Watts I mean for the amount of bandwidth that we're getting and just the connectivity and all kinds of I just can't believe that the idle power consumption is that low so we saw the idle power conception we figured like okay well when we start plugging stuff in of course the incremental every time you you plug the two and a half gig ethernet port in it's gonna like Skyrocket in terms of incremental like power consumption right and the answer to that is no we still got under three Watts which makes it still the lowest power switch even with something connected and so that was absolutely wild and so we're like well maybe the 10 gig adapter would add this a ton so we plugged in you know a adapter tanking adapter in there and we only saw about one incremental watt over when we did the two and a half gig and that that's pretty darn low for that connectivity so overall I mean this thing absolutely sips power and so I really like this platform from a power perspective I know a lot of folks live in very inexpensive power places you probably don't care but for folks that you know live in places where power is very expensive now I would say that those folks are definitely going to care about the fact that this can save you know a couple Watts just since it's gonna run 24 7 most likely so power consumption is awesome and the fact that have a fan means that there's no noise and lower power consumption from that as well [Applause] [Music] okay so I mentioned performance real quick and I was just kind of Flash the charts up for these they were pretty darn similar in terms of performance and about what we would expect from just little switches like this if you want to do something like tag vlans directly on the switch or something like that these are the wrong switches for you but if you just need to go plug a couple things in and get a you know reasonably okay Network um these are pretty good for that okay with all of these I like to have a key Lessons Learned section because I think that's the most important thing like what do we actually learn now number one the obvious one is that these are the exact same Hardware platform maybe you know the sedola one has a different faceplate and maybe there's some a little bit different markings but they're essentially the same chassis same packaging all that kind of stuff and that brings us to pricing right because if they're all the same then price is clearly going to be the only differentiator and that's kind of true because three of these units we managed to get from Amazon now the mocker link folks also sent us one uh which is one that we destroyed for our testing um but you know I just want to kind of show you guys that you know we do have three of these that came from Amazon and they're all in a pretty similar price band with discounts and stuff so those three are the mochrolink the Nick Giga as well as the sedola as we're recording this video they're somewhere in the 119 to 126 dollar range and frankly um the only thing I think is really different to me I think the big things are one the mocher link folks actually have folks that contacted us then I would say that you know if you like the grayish face plate well then that would be the sedola one and if you like to have packaging that's not just a brown box well that would be the Nick Giga just kind of show you that one real quick since uh since it is quite different one thing that you'll notice is that they left the s p cover on so you might not be able to see that it's actually eight plus one also up top it says eight two and a half gig ethernet so you might think like oh my gosh I got the wrong one but you didn't uh it actually says on a little tiny label on the side that this is the nine Port version so that makes our Amazon ranged at 119 to about 126 dollars but there is a less expensive option and that's the one that's really hard to say the huaracho or whatever I don't know how to say if you guys think of something when you put it in the comments or whatever but that one was only 95 and some folks we have definitely heard on the forums and elsewhere have gotten it for lower prices like 85 or even less than that now the disadvantage of course is that that one comes via AliExpress shipping and so if you get it within a week you're super lucky but realistically you're probably going to be waiting a little bit longer than that so this is definitely the case where you can spend less money but wait longer to get the product on the other hand you can get it from Amazon you can get it soon in fact one of these uh I think we actually got same day shipping so that was awesome with Amazon Prime I think that was the Nick gig one over here and you know frankly I know some folks are going to be like oh my gosh why would you spend that extra 25 30 like I could save all that money by going on AliExpress but other folks are going to say like hey uh you know what I got a project it's a today Project or tomorrow project I don't want to wait a couple weeks and have no idea how long it's going to take so I can totally see why you would go and purchase these things on Amazon frankly for 20 to 30 bucks I probably would do that myself now at the beginning of this video I did mention that we ran into one big issue with this and that was actually with the hiracha unit we were testing it we have you know several of these I think these are four that we have on set I think we're up to like eight or so now um one of them one time we put in an s p plus modules and fs.com DAC and we saw uh the unit actually just power down and like reboot or something like that came back online a couple seconds later but just to point out that like you know that that would be um you know that would be scary if that was in a some kind of like super Mission critical Network and it only happened on that SFP plus thing it's probably a quality thing because these things are very inexpensive but um I just want to make sure that everybody knows that we did run into that one issue we couldn't reproduce it but um you know it was there once yeah no I got one more key lesson learned and that is why the heck can't we have folks like qnap Netgear all these guys that make these switch products or these low-cost switch products we just did a giant Ultimate Guide to two and a half ethernet networking I mean like like why can't those folks make these switches there's at least four vendors sitting here on the table I mean one vendor's obviously making these things and four folks are rebranding them but his unmanaged switches these things are not super complicated I really wish that other folks would do this so you don't have to go to the you know sadolas of the world or the nick gigas of the world to be able to get a switch like this I wish that you know I didn't have to call up mochrolink and have those I wish like you know just my qnap guys called me up and said like hey we got something cool right I just wish that at some point this two and a half gig low-cost networking uh you know like actually starts to proliferate because I think that this is a great example I mean these things are lower power than a lot of the five port switches that we reviewed they also have that you know they're eight ports they have that 10 gig ethernet port I mean these things are just frankly better specked and lower power than a lot of the other switches that were reviewed so if you do want a platform like this from a vendor that maybe you've heard of before this video well why don't you go put that down in the description because I know that those folks are watching and they will see that so many devices are coming with two and a half gig ethernet these days that frankly it's time for these things to start dropping in price I don't really mind an eight Port two and a half gig plus a 10 gig you know Port switch in the you know 100 to 130 range I think that's totally reasonable I'd love to hear though what you think below hey guys I hope you like this look at these quiet fanless low power super cheap switches because they are frankly awesome we're gonna have reviews of each of these on the sdh main site along with all the other units that we've reviewed including like Poe options and also ones that are managed and if you did like this video why don't you check out some of our other videos but also give this video a like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 225,032

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, 2.5gbe switch, buyers guide, switch buyers guide, 10gbe, 2.5gbe, 2.5g, 10g, sfp+, 10gbase-t, switch, qnap, zyxel, trendnet, hasivo, mokerlink, netgear, netgear switch, multi gig switch, poe, poe switch, tp-link, ubiquiti, mikrotik, network switch, unmanaged, managed vs unmanaged switch, homelab, 10gbe switch, tp-link switch, tp-link 2.5gbe, cheap switch, cheap 10gbe switch, cheap 2.5gbe switch, cheap 10gbe, cheapest switch, cheap 2.5gbe, horaco, sodola, nicgiga

Id: QgLU-HT1E64

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/jigsaw1024]

Written article: https://www.servethehome.com/finally-mokerlink-2g08110gs-8x-2-5gbe-1x-10gbe-switch-review/

[u/sankao]

This might be the biggest thing to come out of Wuhan in years.

Too soon ?

[u/pdp10]

There were two things I would have liked to see in this review that weren't present:

1. Testing of 10GBASE-T transceivers in the SFP+ port, to confirm functionality at 10 Gbit/s and at the lower multi-gigabit 802.3bz speeds.
2. Testing of absolute maximum power draw when fully loaded down, including the above 10GBASE-T transceiver, to get a worst-case power draw requirement for those who are using alternate power supplies like PoE, DC, or solar.

[u/3G6A5W338E]

Aliexpress link anyone?

None of my searches returned anything relevant, and it's supposed to be there.

[u/SpikeX]

An 8-port 2.5GbE unit from them is $135 on Amazon - maybe I'm cynical but that's not exactly "cheap" when I can get a 1GbE unit that's otherwise identical for $18.

I could use a 2.5GbE switch in my homelab but it's definitely not worth $100+.

[u/cp5184]

It would be nice if you could easily get an x1 pcie 4.0 10g card.

[u/Edenz_]

Curious about the architecture: surely the 10gig link between the two chips isn’t enough bandwidth? Wouldn’t just the one SFP port hog the interconnect?

Edit: i realise this is a dumb comment because i don’t think there’s a situation it can be bottlenecked across the fabric.

[u/[deleted]]

Damn! I write this as I’m looking at my 5 Netgears 10G switches that I bought last year for 600 euros a pop. But at least they have PoE 😆 (MS510TXUP)

[u/AstroZombie1]

I realise I'm an edge case more likely but 2.5gbe gear with sfp+ plus ports and PoE+ was a real pain in the ass to find at the 8 port level.

I ideally wanted Poe++ for wifif7 but that was just completely out of my price range also going to have to mod the switch I did get as the fans are a tad too loud so noctua's it is.