Netgear introduced a new semi-managed switch under its Nighthawk brand called the Nighthawk S8000. The new gigabit switch offers eight ports and a GUI web management interface.
The Nighthawk S8000 keeps the stealth bomber design aesthetic of its larger router brethren with clean lines, sharp angles, and a dark zinc alloy housing. The one downside to this design is that these switches are not stackable but if you need that many ports you are probably looking at a bigger single switch anyway.
Exact specifications are not yet available, but the Layer 2 GS808E switch reportedly offers per-port prioritization and QoS (Quality of Service), DoS (Denial of Service) protection, and IGMP snooping (they don't list which version though so I can't say if this would work well with AT&T Uverse and running TV and PCs on). There are reportedly three pre-set modes and two user customizable profiles that can be set for each port depending on usage: gaming, media streaming, and standard LAN. Further, there are four (Netgear’s site lists 3 in some places) levels of prioritization.
The gigabit switch does support link aggregation (port trunking) up to 4 ports for a single 4Gbps connection to devices that also support link aggregation. This can be configured as a single 4Gbps connection or as redundancy in case one port or cable fails. The use case for something like this would be multiple PCs sending and receiving large amounts of data from a NAS at the same time where the wider connection back to the switch can be meaningfully utilized.
The Nighthawk S8000 comes with a 3 year warranty and will be available in March for $99.99.
There may be better options, especially at $99.99 but fans of Netgear’s Nighthawk wireless routers might be interested. It is hard to say if it is worth the price yet as independent reviews are not out yet. For those interested, PC Gamer has more photos of the switch.
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It’s 2017 and the mainstream
It’s 2017 and the mainstream market is still filled with one gigabit ethernet crap. Time to move on to 10 gigabit.
Agreed, I want to see 10GbE
Agreed, I want to see 10GbE come down in price and enter the consumer market already. Now that I think about it though, I havent even heard much on the 2.5Gb and 5Gb ethernet stuff in a long time much less 10Gb :/
10GE in the consumer market
10GE in the consumer market needs a “killer app” to justify it’s costs and complexity. Complexity you say? Can you run 10GE at 100 meters on Copper? Last time I checked that was very unlikely even with all 4 pairs of Copper in a standard unshielded twisted pair Ethernet cable. It means every pair operating at 2.5Gbps full duplex to achieve 10GE overall throughput (that does not account for the encoding speed of the bits on the pairs which has to be much higher that a 2.5Gbps rate) and not interfere with each other. So other than short runs over Copper, 10GE mean Fiber and Fiber means money, OR, buying very thick (and likely to be somewhat inflexible & costly) individually shielded wire strand Ethernet cables. Perhaps VR will “drive” the demand for 10GE in the consumer market.
As for buying a switch that looks like this one? You are buying it for the looks because it looks cool next to your Nighthawk router. Talk about superficial, but then again the “high end” audio market proves that “a fool and their money are soon parted by the latest cool gizmo”.