Help advise on home switch purchase - I want LACP, > = 24 ports, Web GUI, Low power draw

Archaea

Archaea

[H]F Junkie
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Oct 19, 2004
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I bought a layer 2 HPE Office Connect 1820 switch so I could have greater trunked bandwidth 802.3ad LACP to my QNAP 231P NAS for an upcoming LAN party. I've failed to make it work. See here if interested:
https://hardforum.com/threads/recom...with-lacp-for-nas-use-at-lan-parties.1961076/

I'm back to making another purchase and I desire input from the networking enthusiast crowd - as this isn't my technical wheelhouse.

Here's what's important to my buying decision:



Here are the units I'm now considering:

$200 - Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch Lite 24 Ports Wall-Mountable Fanless Switch with Optional DC Input - ES-24-LITE-US
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-000A-000B1


$200 - Ubiquiti Networks US-24-US Managed Gigabit Switches with SFP1
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-000A-000S4


$150 - Mikrotik Routerboard CSS326-24G-2S+RM
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0XP-002R-000A7


$150 - Refurb Cisco 2960S
eBay


I've been told to ill consider Trendnet, Linksys, D-link etc - - - because they are just lower tier consumer gear that isn't reliable, and newegg reviews more or less seem to confirm that vs the brands like Ubiquiti, Mikrotik, and Cisco.


Which do you recommend, or is there something else I should consider?
 
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None of the Ubiquiti products, I'm afraid- and very likely the Mikrotik as well- are capable of line-speed LACP. To do so, they must run the necessary routing through their CPUs in software rather than through their hardware.

This is a feature that I'd go straight to Cisco for.
 
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Well, I'll need to clarify further; I managed to imply that software LACP/LAG was a bad thing. It's not; however it is an issue if the CPU running said software and the links between the CPU and the ports being aggregated are too slow. This is the case for the Ubiquiti and Mikrotik devices in general, but not necessarily for the Cisco stuff. Different market targets and all that probably.

And I do recommend that you do the digging yourself a bit to limit your retail trial-and-error to just the one switch so far ;)
 
IdiotInCharge said:
None of the Ubiquiti products, I'm afraid- and very likely the Mikrotik as well- are capable of line-speed LACP. To do so, they must run the necessary routing through their CPUs in software rather than through their hardware.

This is a feature that I'd go straight to Cisco for.
Click to expand...

No, the mikrotik is a smart switch that has a proper switch chip for line-rate switching and has hardware based VLAN’s, LACP and STP. The line he referred to was the CSS line so it runs the lightweight SwitchOS which relies solely on the switch chip not the CPU running the web config.
 
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FWIW, the HPE 1820 I couldn't ever get to work. I borrowed my brother's Cisco 2960S tonight to test and it benched much faster than the HPE switch with the same artificial tests. In real world testing, I suppose they were more similar. Perhaps at that point more a limitation of the NAS than the switch.

https://hardforum.com/threads/recom...s-use-at-lan-parties.1961076/#post-1043705717

QNAP 231P
(2) WD 5TB Blues, 5400RPM
Cisco 2960S

802.3ad - dynamic configured on both switch and NAS.

Qnap 231p 8023ad.PNG
 
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I agree it might just be a limitation of that hardware.

On a side note just fyi, I think the LACP standard does not send packets over both slave interfaces that are part of the dynamic group from Host A (server/nas etc) to Host B (client), it is more for when multiple clients are wanting data from the same box, and instead of flooding one interface with packets, it dynamically assigns another interface in the group to talk to each extra client (max of 1 gig per client, or w/e the interface speed is, and max seperate TCP interfaces is dependent on max NICs in group). Which is good for when you need to transfer to/from your box from multiple machines (like backing up on a similar time schedule).

I use 802.3ad with 4 nics with unraid box and a Force10 S60 to stream to a bunch of different boxes throughout the network and it seems to help.
 
boushidosan said:
I agree it might just be a limitation of that hardware.

On a side note just fyi, I think the LACP standard does not send packets over both slave interfaces that are part of the dynamic group from Host A (server/nas etc) to Host B (client), it is more for when multiple clients are wanting data from the same box, and instead of flooding one interface with packets, it dynamically assigns another interface in the group to talk to each extra client (max of 1 gig per client, or w/e the interface speed is, and max seperate TCP interfaces is dependent on max NICs in group). Which is good for when you need to transfer to/from your box from multiple machines (like backing up on a similar time schedule).

I use 802.3ad with 4 nics with unraid box and a Force10 S60 to stream to a bunch of different boxes throughout the network and it seems to help.
Click to expand...
That depends which hashing algorithm your switch(es) support.

It can do it via mac, src ip, dst ip, src+dst ip, and sometimes src/dst port as well.
 
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