Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Taking a Look at a Cheap PoE Switch from keepLiNK”.
I’Ve rolled the dice on AliExpress and I’ve gotten an AI Poe switch that was less than $ 100, but it’s 82 and2 gig ports with a 10 gig SFP plus Uplink. Have I lost my mind, we’re going to find out in this review? Okay in the Box. What do you get? You get an eight Port switch which, in my casee was fanless. It doesn’t have to be fanless. We’Ll talk more about that in a minute you get a power cord, you get a Nifty, little rack, mount ear kit and a business card.
The business card is for keep link, which is a shenzen, keep Link Technology, which is in shenzen, China, which is pretty cool. There’S a bunch of these that are cropping up, that is four 2 and2 gig ports and 2 10 gig ports, or8 2 and 1/2 gig ports and one 10 gig Port. It’S enabled by a new chipset, basically there’s a whole bunch of these under a whole bunch of different brands, brands that you know and love, but also the that are less than $ 100. Us at the time that I ordered this, which is, I thought, a pretty good deal but uh, let’s, let’s break it down cuz.
There are some caveats that we need to talk about all right. First up for the money, you can’t beat it. You get a 10 GB SFP Plus Port and 8 2 and 1/2 gig ethernet ports. This is available in a Poe version and a non-pe version.
There’S a four port version with two 10 gig uplinks. This is really designed for Poe so that you can do power. Ofet and like wireless access point distribution, these are scattered all around a warehouse but as a desktop switch or a downstream switch.
In my case, it’s going to be Downstream of a 10 gig ethernet switch. This is actually pretty good. For me, this solves a couple of problems in my office, one of which is that I was an early adopter of 10 gig over copper and so a lot of my 10 gbit over copper ethernet switches, don’t support 2 and 1 12 and 5 gig, and that Means all of my 2 and a half gig clients now run at 1 gig, which kind of sucks, and before I Splash out on like a 24 Port 2 and 1/2 gig ethernet switch.
I thought I might try these as like a little work. Group switch. So here in the level one labs having a little workbench using our 10 gbit Uplink, plus all of our other 2 and 1 half gig ports. I wondered: would it work with one of these SFP plus to Copper adapters, and the answer is yes? These are uh. Are actually called computo, which is like computex, but not computex at all? These are just generic 10 GB SF, plus adapters um. These are TP Link compatible like that’s what I ordered them as and I’m happy to report that this works just fine.
So this gives me a 10 gbit Uplink to my 10 gbit net gear switch from the dawn of time that doesn’t support 2 and a half or 5 gig, and then all eight of our ports will link up at 2 and 1/2 gig. This is not managed. It’S not even web managed. Although the chipset does actually support web management, there probably is a way to hack it on and enable it, but I was very delighted that, even though this thing is fanless, I was not able to get it to overheat.
I did use the Fleer thermal camera and when this switch has been fully loaded and running for 8 hours, it does get a little concerningly warm. I think that it might have been a mistake to leave out a fan from this if you’re going to have a switch, that is at like 90 % utilization all the time. But if the thing is not being utilized, then it only uses 3 watts of power at a fully idle switch at the wall, 3 watts of power and like one and A2, two watts of that is probably overhead of the power supply. Most of the heat is coming from the power supply in that case, which is shockingly good for our keep link. Eight Port switch inside. We find a pretty standard Arrangement and a DC power brick, so the DC power brick is standard enough that if it ever died, you could easily get a replacement. If you did want to run a fan in here, there is nowhere to attach the fan. There’S no uh header that has actually been added to the system.
If you’re handy with a soldering iron, you could certainly add a fan, not a speed. Controlled fan, mind you, but you could add a fan and there are mounting holes for a fan. So that’s nice! Okay, I’ve been using this a couple of weeks now and I’ve noticed a lot more of these are showing up elsewhere, there’s different configurations of this different brands. Some of them have built-in power bricks. Some of them have a separate power. Brick, some of them are power.
Over ethernet, some of them aren’t. I want to show you what I did to modify this one to add a fan because I did add a problematic, SFP, plus adapter, and I could get the SFP plus adapter itself to throttle, even while the rest to the switch was not throttling. Fortunately, this chassis has a cutout for a fan and mounting holes and screws, and it even has headers on the PCB to make that easy and I’ll also show you a couple of things to check for if you get one of the other models CU, it turns Out that there’s some interesting stuff, so when I was doing the thermal footage, I noticed that it was particularly good at thermal dissipation and that’s because underneath these two heat sinks there’s actually a thermal pad that is going to conduct heat to the metal case.
And that’s also why it sounds a little less Hollow than you would expect. So if you get one of these just eyeball it from the side, look in and see if you’ve got a thermal pad, underneath your two main chips with heat sinks connecting to the Bottom. Now the place where this one doesn’t have a thermal pad is our SFP plus slot. There’S nothing connecting it to the case. It might be okay, fanless if it was connecting to the case I mean it depends on the SFP plus module that you’re using, but some of the copper to uh 10 gbit SFP plus to Copper adapters that I have will work without throttling some of them won’t, Which is interesting so solder in the two- pin header here next to this choke, which also does run quite toasty and then I’m using a noctua, resistor cable, just a four pin, resistor cable on that into a standard, oneu rack mount fan and that’s it. There is actually mounting holes at the side here for a oneu rack mount fan, but you don’t have a lot of clearance. So if you want to get a fan for this because you’re adventurous and you’re a fan of inexpensive switches, well, it’s 40 mm. It’S a standard oneu size fan, but the depth that you’re working with is only a maximum of about 21 22 mm I’d go with 20 mm of thickness our uh industrial fan that I’ve got in here is a little larger, but I’ve just sort of hacked it. In with the noct resistor adapter, it’s good enough now, unfortunately, that does mean that it is not perfectly silent, but you know check out your thermal pads if you’ve got thermal pads between the PCB and the case and you’re not going to run an SFP plus adapter. That generates a lot of heat, you’re, probably fine, just depends and so that that works for Brands other than keep link because they’re all going to be the same PCB k0, 801w, u31, v1.0 or maybe v1.1, which fixes some issues or heck. Maybe we can just talk into including an extra thermal pad underneath the S Plus Port. I don’t know something in terms of other testing like does it work with real Tech? Does it work with the buggy Intel i225 V adapters? Does it work with the good Intel? I225 V adapters, I didn’t find any performance Dropout or bugs uh. It does weirdly fluctuate in uh, just Windows SMB transfers from 236 to 250 megabytes per second, that’s the 2 and 1/2 gig ethernet side of things, and that may or may not have been temperature throttling related because it seemed like it did it more. When the case was on than when it was off on my workbench, but still this thing costs less than $ 100 uh. If you want to trade up a little bit, microti has their new 8 port with dual 10 gig SFP plus, that is web managed, and it is a better device in every possible way that you can measure devices except for the microti has a fan.
This is fanless and completely silent. So as long as you’re not over taxing it. Basically, it’s okay. I actually expected the difference between over taxed and not over taxed for heating to be these little SFP, plus 10 G adapters cuz.
These actually use a lot of power and sort of do dump a lot of heat into the printed circuit board, but the layout in here is pretty good and it didn’t contribute to any sort of problems with this unit. So, there’s not really much else to say it’s an ethernet switch you plug it in and it does stuff if you need 8 2 and a half gig ports. This is great if you can get by with four 2 and2 gig ports. The version that has dual 10 gig might be a better option. There’S also a version of this not from keep link as far as I can tell, but that I saw in AliExpress that deals with vlans like you can toggle vlans support on and off it itself doesn’t really handle vlans through a web goey. As far as I can tell there’s just a physical switch, that’s basically preserve vlans or don’t preserve vlans. So if you set up vlans, you could set the ports up as trunking or untr trunking. I suppose I don’t really know how that would work without giving you some sort of configuration option if you’ve got a complex, VLAN infrastructure, where you want these four ports on one VLAN and another four ports on another VLAN. Maybe don’t do that, but other than that. It just is a dumb switch with a 10 gig ethernet Uplink for less than $ 100 you’re all set, in fact, you’re, probably going to spend like $ 30 to $ 50 on the 10 GB SFP adapter versus the uh platform for your switch so yeah.
I don’t know Quicky. This version is also a Poe switch, so you can run your access points or whatever else you got, but I don’t plan on using it as a Poe version. It was actually only $ 20 more to get the poe version so yeah neat. I what this level one this has been a quick look.
My first look at a keep link product ever, even though it is a metal case. It’S easy to bend with your fingers. If you squeeze it’s kind of thin metal, be careful, be careful when you’re mounting it in a rack, I’m going to use this as a shelf. No, no you’re not going to use it as a rack Shelf at all it it it’ll Bend! I what this level one I’m signing out, you can find me in the level one forums woo. I can’t wait for that. Micro, tick, review, .