New 2x 10GbE + 8x 1GbE $99 Silent Switch MikroTik CSS610-8G-2S+IN

hey guys this is patrick from sth and today we're going to take a look at this thing right here which is probably one of the coolest low cost switches that you're going to see this is actually the micro tick css 610 8 g 2 s plus i n and we're going to break down what all those little bits mean in a little bit but suffice to say the big high level numbers and big high level things that you care about this is a fanless so it's completely silent eight port one gigabit ethernet but then also with two ports of 10 gig ethernet and sfp plus switch it's also 99 so in this video what we're going to do is we're going to talk all about the cool little features and what this actually provides at that sub 100 price point i'm also going to explain what the heck is going on over here because i know some of you guys are going to be wondering about that but before we get too far you might be wondering hey patrick how did you get that amazing sth branded shirt well you can find that linked in the description in our teespring shop and that's how we get the money basically when people buy stuff there that's how we get the money to go purchase units like this to go review and something we're going to do that's a little bit fun is that we're going to actually go through that model number and i really want to kind of talk about it in reverse so first i n what does ion mean well basically that means that we have a desktop and rm means rackmount and in means desktop in microtic nomenclature i don't know that's just what it is and so we have a desktop chassis now something that you're going to notice that i have set up here is there's a little rackier over here and there's a bigger rack here on that side because this even though it's a you know marketed as a desktop switch it actually has rack mount ears so if you want to go rack mount it you can now those two pieces of metal and eight screws to screw them in don't necessarily seem like they cost a lot but also this is a very cost optimized switch so it's kind of cool that microtech would actually go out and put them in the box one other little bit that's just kind of fun is that this unit actually because it is a desktop unit has the little rubber feet the four little rubber feet on the bottom and those are already installed on some other microtic switches you have to go install them yourself and this one because desktop switch already has it and that's not the only feature in this that you wouldn't normally expect another good example is that we get a little external power brick and that's something that is just kind of pretty normal on a switch of this class i mean i think a lot of those that are you know watching this video probably have some kind of like four port five port eight port neck gear unmanaged switch that has an external power supply i mean pretty much in this space that's very common but what is not common is that this actually has two power inputs one of them is on the front which you can see that this power adapter is already plugged into but the other one is that you can actually have poe in and power the switch via power over ethernet and practically what that means is that you can use a poe injector to power this and then you could also have this you know adapter plugged into a battery or another you know service provider you know power input or something whatever it is and actually have a much higher availability solution than if you only had a single power input that is a cool feature but i think it's more of a cool feature for its flexibility rather than i mean this is just not going to be the kind of you know you're not going to run a bank's central network on a switch like this right i mean you're just not going to need that level of redundancy in the vast majority of situations that this is deployed but the fact is that you can use the same switch and pick how you want to deploy it based on do you have poe available or do you have a power outlet nearby and this is actually a feature that we see on a lot of microtics kind of lower bandwidth and lower cost switches there you know for example we have the crs-305 which can do this i think some of the crs-326s can do this and other switches so just kind of cool to see that this is a feature that microtech is actually bringing across a lot of the lower power units in their line now i mentioned that we're moving from the end of the model number to the beginning which means the next we have is 2s and 2s means we have two sfp plus cages now these are both 10 gig ethernet ports and something that is kind of cool is that not only can you use them as 10 gig ethernet ports using sfp plus but you can also go get the rj45 adapter and use them as 10gbaset and so that just adds a little bit of extra flexibility if you have a machine that only has a 10gbase t port you have a solution that you can use and we didn't get to test this for a long period of time but if you do look at the microtic specs they actually don't have any restrictions in terms of using two of those adapters in a system like this now of course those two adapters would pretty much cost about as much as the entire switch itself but you know it's nice to know that you have the option aside from those two sfp plus ports we have the 8g which means that we have eight one gig ethernet ports frankly other than that poe in that we already talked about there isn't really that much that i would want to talk about about the eight one gigabit ports i mean well we all kind of know what one gig ethernet networking is these days and the fact that we have eight ports so that's pretty self-explanatory i don't really think that's that big of a deal but it is nice to have the combination of the 10 gig ports and the eight one gig ports if you just need something that's very compact and you just need something that like you know you can go install a couple of nodes and i'll give you a really good example if you saw our recent rack where we had the mac minis the raspberry pi's and also the tiny mini micro nodes that's a really good example of where you'd have a whole bunch of small nodes or you know those could be either in a little rack or they could be distributed as client desktops or whatever and you can have those all connected by one gig ethernet you could have a local nas that is in one of the 10 gig ports and then use the other 10 gig port for an uplink or something like that as well i think for a big portion of our audience that maybe wants to have a 10 gig nas they have a 10 gig desktop and then they also maybe have a couple little devices whether those are you know those mac minis or the raspberry pi's or whatever they are they just need kind of you know tiny mini micro nodes that need that one gig ethernet this is a really good example of a very low cost switch low power switch and quiet switch that you can use to connect all that stuff in an environment like a little tiny you know home office or small medium business office now the back of the switch basically doesn't have that much going on i mean there's basically some sheet metal with some holes in it for airflow and then we also get a grounding point the side of the switches just kind of keep that theme of having air holes but there's really no feature on the side of the switches now opening the cover we only have a total of four screws it's very easy just to pop off those screws the chassis comes off and you can kind of go look inside there's really not that much going on this is a very small mar-vell chip that runs our entire networking so it's not necessarily we don't have any like giant heat sink assemblies and heat pipe assemblies like we've seen on some other microtic units there's a connectivity for the ports but there's a lot of barren space on the pcb one of the really interesting little nuggets that we saw on this is that this pcb has a couple little non-placed components and they're just kind of little spots for components that are in here that don't necessarily apply to this unit specifically we have a couple different parts of this that are actually designed for things like poe now this is not a pue capable switch but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this pcb was designed so that if microtech did want to turn it into and you know have a new model that was pue capable that they have already the basic pcb layout already done for a switch like that i have to say when we opened up the switch and we looked inside i was a little bit underwhelmed but then i saw that and i was like oh that's really cool it's just not a feature that's in this switch right now but it is something that hopefully is on the roadmap for microtech but again we have no idea if it is it's just that's what we see on the pcb label all right now let's get to that first part of the switch model name and we have css as part of microtic's cloud switch series we are not using router os which is kind of microtics like standard os that they put on all their routers and switches and all that kind of stuff instead this is using microtic's new switch focused management solution which is switch os you still get things like a web gui but you don't necessarily get all the features that you get in router apps you get a much more compact and i guess constrained feature set so i tend to like router os more than i like switch os at the same time when you're talking about switch with eight one gig ports and two 10 gig ports in the sub 100 segment the fact that this has any management at all i think you're just kind of like well that's better than nothing and nothing i would actually kind of be happy even if it had nothing so this is actually pretty good in terms of performance this is really a layer 2 switch i mean this switch is basically made so that you know the idea is you like plug in a couple devices maybe you put a couple of ports on the same vlan or something like that but pretty much this is a pretty basic like plug in the switch and everything talks to each other and that's kind of probably the number one way that the switch is going to be used it's not necessarily going to be used to do really fancy routing or anything like that performance wise if you're going to use it in that scenario where you have you know maybe an uplink maybe a workstation or a nas or maybe a workstation nas plus a couple one gig devices all in the same spot i think this is going to work really well but on the other hand if you want something that you're going to have like you know you're going to want some really kind of fancy high-end performance you want to do routing you're going to have some firewall type features this is kind of not what you want to do on a switch like this again on a higher end switch i would probably say like that's a total deal breaker but on the other hand you know this is a sub 100 switch so you kind of have to take the lens of what the target market is and i think that this is absolutely fine just real quick on the power consumption and noise bit you know we're seeing just around maybe five six watts for the switch itself kind of when it's idling when you start plugging things in it goes a little bit higher but realistically you get to maybe like 11 12 watts max so this is not necessarily like a really high end switch and the other thing that's really cool is because it's a low power switch as you saw inside there are no fans and because there are no fans it means that we don't have any noise if you're like me and you want to have a quiet office having a little switch that doesn't necessarily make any noise is actually a great feature now there is one really quick note on the power that i just wanted to get out of the way which is you know we did notice that there was you know the poe plus this kind of power adapter versions and ways to go power this switch there is something that i kind of wish that microtake had on the switch they don't and that's just that if you look at how this cable is routed into the front of this chassis it's just kind of sitting there and a lot of micro tick chassis actually have little fingers to hold the power cable in and that just keeps the power cable secure so it doesn't just accidentally get pulled out or yanked out or if somebody brushes it and it falls out or anything like that i just think it's a feature that i would have really liked to have seen microtic have there but maybe i guess spending that extra cutting out that sheet metal cost a little bit more so they didn't want to do it i don't know i'd definitely be tempted to take a zip tie and get the power connector zip tied to some of these perforations up here just to make sure that it stays in place now i just want to talk real quick about some of the set dressing that we have here so earlier i talked about how large this rackier is and the reason that this ipad pro is sitting here is just i want to give some sense of scale on just how wide this actual rack here is it's about the same width as my ipad pro that's sitting right here it's maybe a little bit shorter but it's on the same order of magnitude in terms of size the other one is you might be wondering why have we basically had this this switch here with this power adapter here and why haven't we had a ton of b-roll like normal and the answer to that question actually lies over here now these are the normal little rgb ww lights that we use and these are you know the little aputure mcs that are you know 90 they have a battery inside everything's all in this nice little unit i love these little things we have tons of them they're great but we just got the brand new aputure p300c which is this large light over here and that's actually we used two of those and a couple other lights to go make the cover image for this i don't know on camera if you can tell just the scale and size but the new light is much much larger than the old light but we actually did that cover image like just a couple like hours after the second one of these arrived and there's a little handle over here that keeps the mounting point you know and mounting bracket kind of in place and i guess i hadn't fully managed to secure that and so as we were setting that up we took the pictures and all that kind of stuff and it all looked really good but then what happened was this and what you're seeing there is that the mounting point from the light actually swung down and fell and struck the top of the chassis so as a result our switch now has a little mark on it and it actually got bent from just this how heavy this thing is and falling you know metal on metal just kind of bent the lid of the switch now i don't normally talk about those kind of behind the scenes footnotes on you know what's going on and how this stuff all gets made but in this case it actually was really important because you know this happened and i was totally bummed by this but on the other hand you know number one it is a metal chassis and this kind of made me remember that this is not some kind of like flimsy cheap chassis it's not necessarily the thickest metal but at the same time it was able to survive a strike by a piece of metal falling on it which was pretty good in itself sure it took a dent and it got a little scratch which is basically just a character builder and so overall that wasn't too bad but the other thing it reminded me of is just the fact that this is only a 99 switch i may not want to go take a very expensive switch into the field and you know put in my bag or suitcase or something like that but a switch that only costs maybe 99 is not necessarily that bad if i were using it for a trade show or something where a lot of people are going to be walking around and there's a good chance it's going to get messed up or scuffed up or something like that for a 99 switch i don't necessarily i guess care as much as if it was a thousand dollar switch or 500 switch because in the worst case you just go and replace it now i'm saying that of course as someone that has access to a lot higher end technology i know for a lot of people 100 is a lot of money and this is not going to be something that's just easily replaceable and so for those folks i think just the fact that you do get something that is reasonably durable and not just cheap plastic is very nice but for folks that do have access to kind of higher end gear and are just looking for something that costs less that they want to go take on the road i think this is actually a really interesting option and i probably would not have had that thought if this light or this mounting point for the light hadn't fallen onto the switch so overall if all you need is a layer two switch with eight one gig ports and two 10 gig ports i think this is an absolutely awesome option it's not necessarily fanciest it's not necessarily going to be the fastest with all the features that you could possibly want in a switch but on the other hand at under 100 i think it is definitely great now we actually paid i think 106 dollars for an early version of the switch street price right now is somewhere in the 91 to 99 range which is pretty darn good but i do think that any discussion of this switch we kind of also have to look at what else is in the microtic range so for example we have the c rs 305 which is the four port 10 gig switch with also one one gig port and i think that that is really cool if you just need more 10 gig connectivity and need something that's low cost it costs a little bit more than this but at the same time i think that if you're just trying to connect a couple 10 gig you know units and you don't really need one gig i think that's actually a pretty good option but micro tick also has i guess bigger switches that aren't really that much more and a good example of that is something like the css and crs-326 series now this bottom switch is a crs-326in model so this is a desktop model as well you can see that you have 24 1 gig ports and 2 10 gig ports still so you actually get a total of 16 more ports now this is a crs so we do get to use router os on a switch like this however microtic does have a css326 which basically has a very similar port layout but it also uses only switch os instead of using router os and the price on that is only 139 which makes it only forty dollars more than this css six ten and frankly that means that each one gig port on that switch is only two dollars and fifty cents if you just have a small network and you're never going to use those extra ports then well frankly i don't think that there's a good reason to go upgrade to the bigger switch however if you think like okay i have maybe seven one gig ports but i might be adding some stuff in the future and i have two 10 gig things already i mean does that make sense i to me i would just go get the larger switch for forty dollars more with that said i do recognize the fact that in a lot of markets that extra forty dollars is not you know just a de minimis amount and people may not have that budget and frankly when you run a sale like sth you tend to get a lot more nodes than you ever think you would have so for me personally i actually like the css or really the crs-326 a little bit better than the css 610 just because i like having more ports i do think that a poe version of the switch could be really cool and that would be a really awesome reason to go use a smaller form factor like this i think that could be a great use case and when rohit and i were looking at this switch and rohit's main site review again is linked in the description one of the thoughts that we both had independently which was actually kind of interesting was that this switch was like this close to being something that would be a complete killer and that's even if it cost a little bit more the crs-305 has four 10 gig ports and if we were to split the you know four two of those 10k ports into four two and a half gig ports that would give us a total of eight two and a half gig ports and two 10 gig ports all on the same switch which could be in a form factor kind of similar to this if micro tick did something like that and charged around the same amount as the crs-305 maybe even a little bit more i think that would be an absolute category killer just because in this you know 2021 and beyond we're gonna see a lot more two and a half gig networking especially as the new wi-fi 6e standards come out and we get more bandwidth from our wi-fi 6. i think that's going to be something where the access points and stuff like that they're going to just need more than one gig ethernet and then what the other thing is going to happen is just people are going to say wait well if wi-fi is much faster why would i ever want to use wired networking over wi-fi now of course there are a lot of reasons to but just from a pure bandwidth standpoint you know why one gig ethernet is going to start seeming pretty old this year still if you just need a compact switch that's under 100 and you know has those two 10 gig ports eight one gig ports and you just need something that doesn't that's just small like this i think this is absolutely a great option and hey if you made it this far if you drop us a like click subscribe turn those notifications that helps us an absolute ton as always thanks for watching and have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 51,943

Rating: 4.9445925 out of 5

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Id: Xh3oQKcMOmg

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021