Netgear gs908e review in Spanish (full analysis)

Until now having a quality switch at home used to mean having to hide a professional or semi-professional switch somewhere on our desk. Netgear launches the Netgear GS908E, which turns this concept around with two new models. This model that we have analyzed is administrable and it is that we will tell you all its benefits and defects.

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We appreciate Netgear's trust in the loan of the product for its analysis:

Netgear GS908E technical specifications

Professional hardware for the home environment

From this model we will find two variants, the Netgear GS908E, simpler, but with the same design and good performance in terms of manageable bandwidth and another, the Netgear GS908E, which is the one that we will show you today in detail, which adds important features They focus on its ability to be fully manageable by the user.

Both share a good part of their hardware, important parts of it such as the SOC that controls the management of the Switch itself. It has the capacity to offer up to 16Gbps of bandwidth, therefore, capable of offering its full potential on each of the ports simultaneously (8 ports, 2Gbps full duplex), with the ability to prioritize demanding application packets such as transfer video or games.

The self-negotiating connectivity of these switches offers 10, 100 and 1000Mbps link negotiation capacity with full duplex (simultaneous sending and receiving) in all modes. It is capable of handling jumbo packets up to 9K in size and response latencies range from 79µs in 10MBps mode to 2.7µs in 1Gigabit mode. It also has other professional features like supporting Mac addresses up to 4K in size.

It is compatible with the 802.1p standard for QoS and CoS, it is a “green” switch capable of turning itself off when no clients are connected, and it is also capable of disconnecting connectors that are not in use. First-class features that distance this series of switches from which we can buy mainly for processing power and identical to one of the most legendary switches of the brand, the ProSAFE GS108Tv2 manageable metal case.

Friendly design, with cable management

Although I would risk saying that Netgear has dressed in white one of its most recognized switches by the most enthusiastic home users, the truth is that we will not see many differences between the Netgear Signature Edition GS908E and the respected GS180Tv2. It does practically the same thing, it has the same processing power and the management is much easier for users who do not have much experience managing switches.

The GS908E and GS908 share a design. An elegant white box, in plastic, with a minimalist led on the front that does not give us more information than turning on the switch itself. A design thought so that we can hang it on the wall, with drills for it, or leave it on a table, near our daily devices.

It has a rear design that allows us to hide all the cable connectors and also allows us to manage the wiring itself separately and perfectly ordered. For this, it has a small hatch, also made of plastic, that will give us easy access to the connectors and that will also hide them perfectly, giving the complete body of the switch a high quality finish and that will not clash at all in any domestic office or small office.

Its consumption, of about 3w without device load, is also a good example of how we can manage the network consuming less than in other brand switches more oriented to business environments. With its 3w of consumption it is 3 times cheaper, in energy consumption, than the GS108Tv2. Of course you don't need a fan to run either so it has zero noise emissions.

Manageable, IGMP Multicast, Link Aggregation and VLAN

A manageable switch is a great advantage in network management because it also dreams of adding some technologies that help us avoid problems and prevent a device from being able, by itself, to saturate our entire network. This switch has a good number of very modern features, which add excellent and unknown functionality to many.

The interface is "responsive" so we can use it from any browser and from any device.

It has link aggregation, we can create two with up to four synchronized ports to work as a team, this means that we can create with the eight ports that it has up to two 4Gbps Full-Duplex links. The number of added links is configurable, and we will also have a port mirror so that we can similarly traffic from one of the physical ports of the switch to another of them. The pity is that it does not allow us to configure the type of link aggregation, which, if we find in other professional switches, always being static.

Static links force an identical configuration on the device that receives the link, be it a server, router or switch. Dynamic link aggregation handles this automatically as long as everything is compliant with the 802.3ad standard.

Data transfer performance test with link aggregation:

This router also supports Multicast techniques such as IGMP Snooping that allows us to properly redirect Multicast traffic to multiple points on the network, without this traffic being able to saturate all points on the network. This type of traffic is found, for example, in IPTV and streaming services. With this we will avoid many saturation problems in the network.

It also supports VLAN and in the two types that are more common. We can do it at the port level, which is the most basic method or through the 802.1Q standard that would work through all the physical ports of the switch.

The Netgear GS908E also has its own QoS and CoS system to prioritize traffic or control traffic ratios through each port. QoS supports mode per port or through the 802.1P protocol. The first is the easiest to apply since we do it by port, giving the switch four assignable priority levels.

The second method labels packages and requires compatibility by the device and / or operating system. I like the detail that it has a filter for broadcast traffic that is usually a good problem when we find network saturation. You can control the consumption of each port, input and output, but only at the packet size level and not pure and hard bandwidth flow.

Monitoring

This switch also has some tricks to improve the stability of our network connections. It has automatic or manual control of the state of the wiring, it is able to check if it has updates to the operating system, it checks CRC errors for communication on the network and it also monitors the added links.

Another thing that I really like is that it has a system to avoid looping problems within the network, such as when we use the same cable on two switch ports, with autodetection of the problem and blocking of the port that is causing the problems.

USB device charging

The Netgear Signature Edition GS908E model, in addition to the management features we have seen before, which make it much more capable than its younger brother, this model also has something that the basic version does not have.

In the back we will find two USB type A ports that we can use to charge any device that we are charging with USB cables, whatever the type. Each port has 10w of charging power reserved, 2A at 5v, with a total charging capacity of 20w.

It is true that this is not the fastest charging speed that we can find currently on the market, but it is the usual one for most devices and will allow us to charge quickly and multiport without sharing the output power. Netgear always guarantees us 10w of charging power in each of the two connectors.

It is a great idea because if the switch can now be part of our catalog of devices in sight, saving us a charger above the table is always a great idea. If we are going to keep the switch hidden we will only have to use somewhat longer cables without significantly losing power.

Conclusion and final words about Netgear GS908E

This new series of Netgear switches wants to make the integration of its most interesting ranges more friendly within environments where the design is sought more than the reliability of its metal box models, but without ruling out benefits highly appreciated by users such as their power of process or the possibility of managing the operation of the switch.

Personally I think that the Netgear Signature Edition GS908E model does not offer anything that we cannot have in other switches on the market, except for a well-dimensioned SOC so that the switch has a perfect performance in any situation of use, but the GS980E is an interesting model that it brings us, quite easily, to a comprehensive management of the switch.

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It is like a plastic version and friendly design of the powerful GS108Tv2, where a much more interesting and manageable interface is also introduced than in this more "professional" model. It has practically the same benefits, it adds the possibility of charging devices and the price is even somewhat cheaper (72 Euros), just a few Euros, but cheaper.

Netgear GS908E-100PES - Smart Managed Plus Gigabit Ethernet Network Switch (8 Ports with Single Cable Management and 2 USB Charging Ports) 8 Port Smart Managed Plus Gigabit Network Switch with Simple Cable Management; It has 2 USB charging ports and easy to configure with optimized mobile web interface 54.95 EUR

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ Right price for your services	- Does not support dynamic link aggregation
+ Supports link aggregation	- Bandwidth limitation is by packet size only
+ Excellent QoS and VLAN system

The Professional Review team awards him the medal of:

Netgear GS908E

DESIGN - 84%

PERFORMANCE - 85%

CONNECTIVITY - 82%

PRICE - 85%

84%