TP-Link TL-SG1005D Gigabit Switch Review

Here is my review of the TP-Link TL-SG1005D 5-port Gigabit Desktop Switch.

Price

This cost me $65 from OnLine Computer store in George Street, Sydney Australia. I had planned to import a D-link DGS-2205 using family in the states, because it can be had for US$25. I was attracted by the lower power, and the documented Jumbo Frames support of 9600 bytes. But that would involve a couple of weeks wait and my patience got the better of me, and plumped for the TL-SG1005D. Read on for whether it supports jumbo frames…

Performance

The whole point of gigabit ethernet is fast file transfers. For file copies this means you MUST have jumbo frames support on every device in your network route. I could find no mention of jumbo frames anywhere on the TL-SG1005D packaging. There was also no mention of whether the TL-SG1005D supports jumbo frames anywhere on the internet which is unusual. Not even on the manufacturers specs. All of this set off alarm bells but I figured “what the hell – every device is bound to support jumbo frames these days!”.

Ok, let’s not pretend I am going to do any thorough benchmarks on this device, but here is what I’ve discovered from casual testing:

I have connected two high spec PCs together using this switch. One is an MA78GM-S2H (v2.0) based PC, running Vista SP1, which has integrated “Realtek RTL8168B/8111B Family PCI-E GBE NIC”. The other is an Gigabyte 790G based board (can’t remember model), running Windows 7 RC, featuring an “Realtek RTL8168c(P)/8111(P) Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.20)”.

To start of with neither card had jumbo frames enabled.

I copied a 1Gb movie file accross the network and was very disappointed to see a copy speed of somewhere between 11 and 13 MBytes/s! Wow – almost no benefit over normal ethernet!

I then enabled the jumbo frames on both PCs. For some reason both these NICs only let you set 7K as the maximum jumbo frame size, which is a bit disappointing. The size to shoot for from what I read is 9K. Oh well.

I then copied 2.3 GB of video between the machines and I got a time of 54 seconds…. (drum roll)… thats approx 43 MB/sec. Not bad at all (about 4x the speed of regular ethernet).

Still being a bit disappointed I decided to see what the actual size of packets I was managing to get across the network using this switch. Using the ping -f -l command I was able to narrow down the frame size to 4054 bytes.

Given that both the NICs were set to 7K frame sizes that leaves me no other conclusion than:

The TP-LINK TL-SG1005D supports jumo frames of up to 4054 bytes.

No wonder they don’t advertise the fact. It’s a bit disappointing, but I won’t be returning this device. According to SmallNetbuilder 4K is the frame size they usually use for jumbo frame testing for NAS’ etc. So it’s obviously a lowest common demoninator.

All said the 43MB/sec transfer speed is much faster than I had before so I am happy for now, but from what I can tell from a quick google it seems performance can get much better than this (over 50MB/s at least).

Heat/Noise

The TK-SG10005D does not have any active cooling (i.e. no fans) so is completely silent. I did not detect any electrical buzzing noises either. After an hours use the plastic case of the switch was completely cool to the touch.

Power

The PSU which comes with the device is 9v 0.6A (max 5W) which is very low powered, and explains the cool running. The box art does claim the badget “Green Ethernet” so maybe it actually lives up to the name. The PSU which comes with the Australian device is fairly small, but is a typical one where the brick is intergrated with the prongs. I have seen ones that are much more unweildy/awkard than this though.

Warranty/Support

The box claims the device comes with a 3 year warranty, and provides support numbers (1300-TPLINK) and emails (support@tp-link.com.au) for support specific to Australia which is nice.