Linksys SE3005: 5-Port Gigabit Switch

works great

VERY IMPORTANT: This review is specifically about the 8-Port switch. Many features and considerations regarding this switch DO NOT APPLY to other options, especially the 16 and 24-Port versions.

Updated May 28th 2015 due to specification changes.

It’s an unmanaged switch. It gets data from place to place with Plug and Forget simplicity. Why buy this over the less-expensive SE2800? There are several reasons you may want to. Read on…

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The Praise (Good Things)
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+ All metal construction for a sturdy switch
+ Runs cool
+ Gigabit capability
+ No Head-of-Line blocking, contention handling, and flow control
+ Uplink Autodetection (MDI/MDIX)
+ QoS handling

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The Raze (Bad Things)
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– Inconsistent product package content inclusion

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The Haze (Things to Consider)
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* Unmanaged switch
* Port lights on the front, cabling on the back
* External power converter

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The Details…

I said it at the top and I will say it here again: This review applies ONLY to the 8-Port version. The 16-Port and 24-Port versions have substantially different features and specifications and this review cannot accurately inform you on them. With that being said…

It was time to move from an integrated wireless router to a separate 

Wireless Access Point

,

Router

, and Switch. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I snagged an SE2800. Then I returned that, did some better research, and I grabbed this. One month later it’s been put through the basic paces and I can give some information and things for people to consider.

The one and only disappointment I’ve had with this switch is that I ended up acquiring three of them (for various reasons) and one package did not contain the rubber feet. Sealed package. No feet. Sad me. Otherwise, I am quite very happy with this switch.

Automatic MDI/MDIX detection is pretty standard these days and simply means that you can plug in an uplink without having to worry about whether it needs a crossover cable.

Quality of Service (QoS) tagging is a very good thing to have if you do anything with in-home video or audio streaming. It helps ensure that time-sensitive data gets to where it’s going without waiting for things like that huge file you’re copying to the other computer. After all, the wait is only a few fractions of a second, but that’s enough to make your video all blocky and icky.

The 8-Port version has an external power supply and the ones I received are skinny to the left. This is a great way to keep the transformer away from the plug beneath or above the one used, but iff you have side by side plugs on a power strip, this will end up blocking the leftward plug.

It’s also nice to note that the 8-Port switch has a very clean face. It is made to be a desktop switch, with wiring and cables in the back and a clean front to give basic connection information. This does create a less-ideal situation if the switch is wall-mounted, as the wall mount holes will only accommodate mounting with the cables up or down. As a person with cats, I have to have the switch well off the ground, and this makes viewing the status lights impossible without standing very close to the switch to see the top surface, or mounting it with the cables up which I personally do not prefer to do. I would have loved to have had sideways mounting options. Ahh well.

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Why not go cheaper?

Now I am a frugal person. I originally got the 

Linksys SE2800

 a a local store but then that was returned in favor of this. But why? Why would I spend nearly an extra 25% (at the time of writing) on this switch? Simple: My network is important to me. My network is also important to my wife. My wife is important to me too. That and the fact that if the network has problems, I get to sleep in the car.

This switch does not bump up the price just because of the metal case versus the plastic mushroom-case on the SE2800. There is more to it.

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FEATURES! But what do they mean?

Both switches will deal with Quality of Service (QoS) tagging. That is important if you do anything like streaming video, voice calls, and other time-sensitive things on your network. But this switch has some extra things that make it that head above the other.

— “Non head-of-line blocking architecture”
This one is nice. Now, mind you, this will only affect you if you have more than two things connected to the switch, so if you are just using it to pipe data between two computers, you can ignore this feature. But if you are using a lot of ports, or especially if you have a file server or other network device that has a lot of traffic going to it, this feature will give you an improvement in network performance.

When two or more pieces of data arrive at the same time that need to go to the same place, the switch can only send one at a time. Head-of-line blocking (HOL Blocking) means that while it makes the second (and third and fourth) arrival locations wait, it also makes the pieces of data BEHIND those initial pieces wait too. By avoiding head-of-line blocking, the switch is able to move other data in front of the pieces that have to wait and send them on their way without impacting network speed. This is like the waiting spot at McDonald’s drive through. Somebody ordered $50 worth of stuff, so they can wait there for it to be ready while other people who just wanted to get a drink are able to be handled without having to wait.

— “Full-duplex IEEE 802.3x flow control” (and the rest)
Notably, it’s the “And the rest” part that is important here. The SE2800 does support 802.3x, however there was no indication that it would deal properly with half-duplex backpressure and especially broadcast rate control. The SE2800 is not an incapable switch. This is just a more-capable switch. In all honesty, in most home-use cases, you’ll never encounter a need for this, however if you know you need it, or ever do encounter a case where it is helpful, it will save you a tremendous amount of sadness. It’s a fancy way of saying that the switch helps take more intelligent control of the traffic in the event of something unexpected or mixed old and new technology.

Overall, in testing, the core of the switch runs cooler and this switch has more switching capacity than the SE2800.

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Built metal tough

I mentioned I have cats. Nightmare creatures from beyond the void whom I love dearly, but their destructive prowess cannot be topped by anything short of a bulldozer driven by a maniac elephant. Even their fur is a bane to computers. Remember that SE2800 I returned? Plastic. Yeah… It was not pretty.

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Summary – Worthwhile for a stable, reliable network
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I love my wife and she loves me, but that won’t stop her from getting grumpy if our network has problems. I don’t like a grumpy wife, so this switch has been an excellent solution. The additional features it carries over the SE2800 also make it a very worthwhile investment despite its higher cost. The best part is that the cats have not yet succeeded at even dinging it.

Take a look at the info I give you and you should be able to tell if this is the best purchase for you. If there’s not enough information, let me know what questions you have and I’ll try to find out and let you know.

As always, please let Amazon and I know if my review is helpful to you. If it’s not, let me know why in a comment so I can give better information in the future. I monitor my comments and reply to questions, and I do updates on reviews when I am able.

exactly what i needed thanks

Perfectly good switch, but comes with an American power supply… now I have to buy an adapter 🙁

Es un SW que no falla, es lo mejor para uso de oficinas pequeñas y en casa, muy estable y confiable (lo fabrica CISCO para este nicho de mercado) así que si no quieres sufrir con tu conectividad yo lo recomiendo.

I recently had to reinstall Windows on my PC and was redownloading some games to the local drive and it was taking forever. I checked my network connection and the speed was down to 10Mbps. I checked my cables and they were Cat 5e, and I was connected to a Linksys SE2800 8-Port Gigabit Switch. I tried multiple things, but it was going to take days to download all the games. 1 game was saying 8hrs to download. I decided to just replace the switch with this one and ordered it from Amazon and 4pm. It was delivered the same day , I installed it and the speed jumped to 1Gbps. Based on this I restarted the downloads and the download speed went from a max of 10Mbps to a high of 700 Mbps. Needless to say I was able to download all the games in a couple of hours. It was well worth the $40 to save myself a ton of time downloading files. I was also starting to see issues while watching Netflix on my TV, and these issues have gone away. Note: resetting the switch did not speed up the system.

Works good. Didn’t loose any speed.