MikroTik CRS328-24P-4S+RM Video Review

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we have something that's super cool and that is the microtic crs 328 24p 4s plus rm and i did that in one take which is pretty darn good for me now that model number makes a lot of sense when you break it down the crs is microtics basically switch series you also have the 28 in the 328 and that 28 means that we get 28 ports total now of those we have the 24p which means that we have 24 power over ethernet enabled one gigabit ethernet ports we then have the 4s plus which means that we have four sfp plus 10 gig ethernet ports and then rn means that this is a rack mount unit so let's just talk a little bit about the hardware really quick before we talk about some of the impacts so first off you look at the front of the switch and what are you going to see well you're going to see this giant block of 24 ports but they're going to look a little different than some of the other 24 port microtic switches that we've seen before there are port markings on both the top and the bottom now the bottom those are the kind of standard activity lights but the top those are micro ticks way to show that you either have higher lower voltage power over ethernet you're also going to notice that it's just not one giant block of 24 ports in fact you're gonna see that there are three sets of eight ports each and that's really important and we're gonna show why when we get into the inside of the chassis moving along we have four sfp plus ports now these are 10 gigabit ethernet ports you can use the sfp plus to rj45 and get 10g base t out of these ports we have an entire review not only of the microtic unit but we also have a giant series in terms of a guide to basically we bought all the ones that we could on amazon and we looked at how they all performed so we have a comparison or a buyer's guide for that as well we'll link that in the description we're also going to link in the description rohit's full review of the switch because we're only going to go over some of the higher level details in this video but if you want to go see kind of the more full review go check or hits peace out we'll link that in the description and the other part of the front of the switch that you're going to see which is actually perhaps maybe the most interesting part of it is you're gonna see that there's a serial console port which is kind of normal and that wouldn't normally get really excited there's some leds there's reset and power and all but those are not the big feature it's actually what's missing the one gig management interface is kind of like a hallmark of the crs line at this point we just kind of expected it was going to be there we ordered the switch we got it in we had no idea that it didn't have this one gig management port because we just kind of figured that it did and we didn't realize until we went to go set up the switch and start taking photos doing all that kind of stuff like hey wait what's missing here oh that one gig ethernet port that we would use for management just is in here so i guess we have to use one of the poe ports for management um okay we can do that but we just kind of weren't expecting it so something just to keep in mind and i really hope that the microtic guys had a good discussion about why they wanted to remove that maybe it was just to reduce costs and it saves you a ton of money by not having that extra port in the switch so that's why they did it i think that's great if it was a dollar or two then i would say hey why didn't you just keep a hallmark feature but i don't know the answer to that one just kind of a thought based on working with a lot of the other products let's kind of get back to the switch and on either side what you're going to see is two fan holes now actually there are only two fans installed on the left hand side of the switch but you could put two other fans on the right hand side of the switch because there are mounting holes for them talk about that in a second because instead we're gonna move to the back of the switch on the back of the switch it's pretty plain i mean there is literally a power input and that's it you have your ac power input right there and the one nice thing that microtech does is that they actually have a locking mechanism so that way you don't accidentally pull that power cord out from the device so that's kind of a cool it's just a piece of wire but it's actually kind of a cool feature so let's open this thing up and look inside now underneath that black cover what you're going to see is a power supply now remember this is a 370-ish dollar switch and so having a 500 watt power supply primarily to power power over ethernet ports and it's actually pretty large power supply in this segment now you're also going to see this giant pcb complex and there's a main pcb which has all the switch chip it has all of the management all the ports all that kind of stuff but then above it you're gonna see a series of three other pcbs now each of these pcbs aligns to a set of eight ports on the front of the switch and it just so happens that the way that microtic specs the power over ethernet on the switch is they say well you can have type 1 you can have type 2 or poe ple plus any of the ports can run either of those specs however you can get a total of 450 watts total so these three power boards actually give each set of eight ports a total of 150 watts between them so you could run in theory poe plus and you can do 30 watts per port but you don't actually have enough power because i'll be eight times 30 which is 240 so that's a little bit too much but realistically number one you're probably not running full power on every single port so having a little over subscription is kind of the industry norm and it makes a lot of sense here so each set of those blocks that we saw on the front of the chassis that has eight ports per is actually aligned to one of these pcbs which means that it's actually pretty easy to go figure out okay well where are my 150 watt buckets and you can actually just kind of see that when we open up the switch and you kind of look at it it makes actually a lot of sense so let's talk about the power supply and power consumption because i think those kind of go hand in hand now the switch itself only uses about 20 to 25 watts if you don't have any poe devices plugged in i think i think we actually had two cameras plugged in and it was still somewhere under 30 watts by a pretty long shot we got the switch up to about 40 watts but microtic says that the switch complex itself without any poe devices can use up to 44 watts so you have a 500 watt power supply you have a 44-ish watt switch which leaves about 450 watts left for poe devices and you have three 150 watt poe boards and so that's how this whole thing is provisioned we actually peeled off that big black cover and something that we saw was that there's a giant power supply in there to some people this may not look like a big power supply but just for reference we took a 750 watt 80 plus platinum power supply out of a server that we're reviewing as a super micro model and just put one of those in front of the power supply that's in this micro tick switch just to give you an idea microtix is a 500 watt power supply the super micro one has an internal fan it has the plug inside and it is a 750 watt power supply and it is much more compact seems like that micro tick is making their own power supply here and that's kind of how they're getting some of their cost savings so that makes sense now the power supply is number one it's not redundant and number two it's not hot swappable so you have one power supply one power input and you can't hot swap it so if the power supply dies you have to go get a new unit is basically the answer before we finish the switch hardware something that we want to talk about is the fan headers because i think that this is one of those switches that people are going to look at they're going to say hey i wonder if i can go do a fan mod 2. so there are a couple things about that first off we actually had the switch running and when we came what came with the original firmware it was audible but it wasn't super loud and then we updated to the newest firmware and we couldn't hear the thing anymore it was silent so at the end of the day i think that especially if you only have a couple devices plugged in i mean i think we have like something like eight ip cameras plugged into the thing and we had an sfp port going and it was dead silent so that was pretty interesting at least noise wise it was not too loud now on the original firmware we could definitely hear the fan and when you first plug the switch in you do get some fan noise but then it goes away after two three minutes so i don't really know if we want to talk about the fan noise too much now the fans do annoy you something that you have as an option is you could replace the fan say with some noctua fans or something like that so inside the board there are the two 4 pin pwm fan headers that the existing fans are already plugged into but on the other side of the board there are actually two more pwm fan headers that just aren't being used but they're there and not only are they there but they even microtech even puts the pins and what the marks what the different pins are directly on the board kind of like they're thinking hey maybe people are going to want to go do some kind of fan mod here of course you probably avoid your warranty if you go do that but at the end of the day she did have a switch that was maybe running under a little bit of load so you did need a little bit more air flow through it and so you said hey i want to go put not two of fans on the other side and get enough air flow through the switch you could do that and it's actually pretty easy because microtic it seems like they're definitely hearing what their customers are doing and they're making it easier and easier to do something like that so on the hardware side you know we basically have a 24 port power ethernet switch you have four 10 gig ethernet ports which gives you a lot of flexibility because you can plug in things like nasa's or servers or whatever you need so for example if you have a whole bunch of surveillance cameras that your or aps or something like that that you need to access servers or you need to access storage because maybe you need to store video files you can totally do that all in one switch which is actually kind of really nice and remember this is a 370-ish dollar device this isn't a you know 500 or 600 device 700 or more that you see some from some other vendors in this range and it actually has those four 10 gig ethernet ports are a big differentiator so just talking about performance real quick now this is definitely a layer 2 switch you do not want this switch doing things like your routing for your network or anything like that but in terms of a layer 2 device it works reasonably well now router os has features in it such as you can actually go run a firewall or something like that but we would say this is that you have the feature you have the option to run the future but it's probably there's just not enough horsepower in the marvel switch chip and the arm processors the 32-bit arm processor and there's just not enough horsepower there to really power that kind of device now microtic actually builds this as a dual boot device you can use router os or switch os either one we always use router os on these types of switches so that's kind of what we tested with now what you have the option and this is kind of something that's really interesting in the microtech world is that you have web fig so you can have a gui management interface using web browser that's really easy to use and that's important in the smb sector where maybe people don't necessarily know how to use clies to manage different switches beyond the web fig there's actually an application called winbox which is microtix kind of bread and butter desktop application that helps you manage you know a bunch of switches or even just a single switch and if you look at webfig versus winbox they actually have a lot of very similar functionalities the difference between using a desktop piece of software versus using a web piece of software if you are a cli person or you just want to use things like automation well microtech has a cli as well so in summary you get a web management interface a desktop application management interface and you get a cli that gives you a lot of flexibility in managing the switch so if you're in sbit maybe you're buying this for your small company or maybe you're an smb service provider but you don't necessarily use a lot of microtech devices it's really easy to use a web interface but if you have a whole bunch of these under management or maybe you're just a you've been a cisco admin for years so you're kind of really comfortable with clis then that's an option too so overall if we just take a step back and we think about the package that we get with the crs-328 we get a pretty nice set of power ethernet ports we get some 10 gig networking that just most other switches in this class simply don't have four 10 gig ethernet ports so there's absolutely a lot of differentiated functionality here and i just wanted to kind of take one second we don't normally go into some of these details but i just wanted to take one second and talk about some other little bits that we noticed now first off the packaging for this we don't do unboxings but the packaging for this was actually a lot nicer than we were expecting a lot of the microtic crs line especially the lower dollar ones have some pretty minimalistic packaging when we opened up the box for the crs 328 we actually had a full foam cover and insert in there to protect the switch and shipping which was really cool our switch came double boxed and so overall i mean this was actually a pretty big surprise in terms of how well this was packaged in what might be the absolute smallest feature that you could imagine not only do you get the power cable and the rack mount ears but you get one other little thing in the package that's not mentioned on the website and it's not mentioned in the product brief you actually get little tiny rubber feet so instead of putting this in a rack if you just want to have it on your desk for i don't know why reason you can totally do that as well and you have little rubber feet now prior to doing this switch we also did the reviews of the microtech crs 354 series now there's a 48 g and a 48p model the g model doesn't have power over ethernet but does have redundant power supplies the p model has only single power supplies but it does have poe and a lot more pue capacity than this board does frankly i actually think that if you do want to go beyond 24 ports you really have two options so first off you could just go buy the bigger switch which i think makes a lot of sense frankly there are a lot of installations where you don't necessarily have more than 24 poe devices so maybe this is just the poe switch and the rest of the microtech line has sfp plus so in theory you could take this switch and handle your pue and then just add whatever other types of switch ports you need based on the microtic line and just use 10 gig ethernet to tie it all together and that can work pretty darn well i actually think that for my personal use i was thinking about what would i use at home and we're putting in new security cameras and so the question is would we use the 24 port version or would we use the 48 port version because well we always end up needing more switch ports so i think i would actually go up to the 48 port unit and that's really just to be able to get the extra qsfp plus 40 gig ethernet or break out into 10 gig ethernet ports on the other hand if you don't necessarily need that kind of functionality a really inexpensive way to go about this is to use this switch for your power over ethernet and 24 power ethernet ports but then use that those 10 gig ports to actually link to either a 10 gig ethernet switch or to just link it to a normal one gig ethernet switch that has 24 ports as well personally i would go with a 48 port model but that's just because i run sth and well we have tons of devices coming in and out all the time and in fact we have a project going on where i think we were adding something like 18 nodes or something like that in one go so frankly having more switch ports is actually kind of nice but for a lot of people hey you just don't need that and so i think this switch is an absolutely awesome option on the market and frankly there aren't really a lot of comparable switches at this price range new overall the microtic crs 328 24p 4s plus rm is a totally awesome switch in the 370 dollar range now there's certainly a lot of applications where it doesn't make sense but for the price range and the features that it offers it's pretty much a class leading device that doesn't have any comparison hey guys if you made it this far thanks a bunch and if you have made it this far and you haven't subscribed well i think it's a good time to go and hit that subscribe button turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with a new video because we're putting out new content all the time we have new content on the sth main site that we don't post on youtube every single day so you should definitely go check out the main site we're gonna have a whole bunch of links in the description where you can find some stuff that we reference in this piece thanks again for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 58,273

Keywords: MikroTik, mikrotik switch, mikrotik review, mikrotik 10gb switch, mikrotik poe switch, poe switch, poe switch for ip camera, 24 port switch, 24 port gigabit switch, cheap poe switch, poe switch review, mikrotik switch review, mikrotik crs328-24p-4s+rm, mikrotik crs328-24p-4s+rm review

Id: XPzy7XOfp7M

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020