Mokerlink 2G24210GS Management
Again, this is an unmanaged switch. There is no PoE involved either. The only “management” style features are the SFP mode and VLAN switches on the front.
Mokerlink 2G24210GS Performance
Here is what we saw passing traffic through the switch.
This is certainly not the best performance we have seen, but on a fairly cheap switch it is not terrible by any means.
As a quick aside, we have a new tool that is taking some time to be built, but it is coming along nicely, which should let us push 1.6Tbps to 2Tbps of complex flows through gear. This is one of the last switches that is being done with the old method.
Mokerlink 2G24210GS Power Consumption and Noise
At idle, we got 9.3W.
Adding a 2.5GbE link, we added 1W to 10.3W.
Putting our SFP+ to 10Gbase-T adapter added 2W to 11.3W.
Power consumption is certainly higher than the lower-port count switches, but for the density, we will take it. The switch itself is silent which is great. It is also one of the few 24-port 2.5GbE switches that we have seen without fans and we did not have issues with shutdowns or anything running the switch for two months.
Final Words
Is this the best switch out there? Certainly not. On the other hand, for $258 to get this many ports, is not too bad. Smaller switches may be cheaper, but there is an advantage to having a single switch instead of many smaller ones. If you want management, you would want to look elsewhere, but for a simple unmanaged switch, this works. Also, it is silent which is nice.
Overall, this switch surprised us as being a bit better than expected. We ran it hard just to see if we would get stability issues and we did not. If you are looking for an inexpensive, silent, unmanaged 24-port 2.5GbE switch with two SFP+ 10GbE links, then this might be it.
Where to Buy
If you want to check current pricing or buy one of these, here is an Amazon Affiliate link.
I don’t get it, wouldn’t you want 25 or 40Gbit for uplinks with this? 10Gbit is a bottleneck if you have 24*2.5 = 60Gbit all running at once
@Kingneutron: It’s absolutely a bottleneck; but traditionally edge switches have gotten away with a fair amount of oversubscription. The ‘uplink is also gigabit; but optical for distance’/’10Gb uplink is the big spender model/a proprietary option card’ thing seems to have become significantly less common over time; but I routinely see setups where 48 port switches are just left with half their uplink ports empty because 1 link means no redundancy but nobody actually cares that 2 rather than 4 is less than half of peak downstream bandwidth).
Given what the core switch of someone buying ~$260 unmanaged switches looks like; they quite possibly don’t want 25 or 40Gb, just because they won’t necessarily have anything to plug it in to. Makes me wonder how much they would have had to charge for 4x10Gb.
That said; if you look at it as a relatively cheap way for a basically 1GbE switch to have a few ‘VIPs’ at a time(without the hassle of a fixed port allocation that you need to plan and wire accordingly) I can see the appeal: if your overall usage patters are still light-ish 1GbE edge switch stuff people mostly won’t notice the 20Gb uplink; but when someone does need to do an install from the internet or file server it can happen at 2.5Gb speeds.
What is the x-axis showing in the performance chart?
They show time elapsed. IIRC on old charts that was like 30 min worth
> The switch chip is a Realtek RTL9302D. That is a “managed” switch chip (basic management), but this is an unmanaged switch.
This probably means if you can get OpenWRT running on this thing, it can actually be a managed switch. Similar to how https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/commit/39b9b491bb585ba6c16dfc28e5dd0316c8fe7b0d made it possible to use the RTL9303-based TP-Link TL-ST1008F as a managed switch. Is there a serial header somewhere? I don’t see it from a quick glance at the top-of-PCB photo.
“The toggle allows them to run at 10G or 1G instead. Strange, but it is what it is.”
I suspect this could be for connection compatibility down the line; I’ve had a lot of routers & ‘gateways’ that wouldn’t do anything except 100Mb unless I forced the connection mode to 1Gb FDX. Interesting feature!
@Scott Lamb
> Is there a serial header somewhere? I don’t see it from a quick glance at the top-of-PCB photo.
Maybe that “CON1” 14-pin location has serial on it?
I see the Winbond chip is 128MB DDR3, so not great but passable. I couldn’t figure out where the flash chip is, too hard to read all the candidates, but that might be too small (or at least require some soldering to bring it up to spec). A 128/512 device should work just fine with OpenWrt, as you don’t need any of the space hog packages on a switch…
@Eric, the PCB shot of the unmanaged 24 x 2.5GB + 2xSFP+ switch on the STH youtube channel has a 512MB Micron DDR3 chip instead (at 11:57) – which is pretty curious lack of cost optimisation for a switch marketed as unmanaged :o).