TP-LinkTL-SG1008D 8-Port Unmanaged Gigabit Desktop Switch

Very reliable, never had problem, the price is excellent, its thin and light weight. Just plug it in and will go on for years without any issues.

The best compliment I can pay to this switch is that I got it working straight away!I got this as I have cable internet and I wanted to put my cable modem and wireless router in the living room and I still wanted wired connectivity in my bedroom in the other side of the house. I simply ran a long cat5e cable through the loft, dropped it down into the bedroom and plugged the cable into this switch. I them simply plugged the devices into the switch (a PC, NAS, internet radio and PS3), plugged it into the mains and I had a network connection. It was as simple as that!This model has a lot of good reviews, is reasonably priced and has 8 ports which means I have room for expansion. I don't see the point in getting one with less ports as the price saving is negligible.I can't see how you can go wrong with this switch for normal domestic use.

OK so it's slightly cheap looking and plasticy, but connect to a network and add some devices and it works - no hassle.It's small and light-weight so I carry it with in my bag of bits me to customer sites where I often need to connect a number of PC's in a meeting room and the customer doesn't have enough ethernet connections in the room. Plug this box into a single network connection, connect the PCs and I can get half a dozen PC's all working on the network in a jiffy.I need a cheap device because there is a high-risk I'm going to forget about it and leave it at a customer-site so will never see it again. Despite the light-weight finish it has survived travel in my bag unharmed.Great little unit

For those of you who are unfamiliar with an unmanaged network switch, they basically plug in and go. There is no user friendly page to access or other configuration on the switch to do.You can set up static IP addresses on your computers/etc. and plug in to the router so that they can talk to each other, or you can connect one of the ports to a router that is set up to assign the IP addresses.Once the IP addresses have been set up, so long as they are in the correct range, then a switch will allow you to talk between each device.I've have a 5-port 10/100 switch for years and have never had any problems. This switch works just fine too and I don't expect any problems. To confirm this, I bought two and have been running them for a couple of weeks now without any issues.The LEDs on the front blink to indicate that network traffic is passing through a particular port, but they are only green. It would have been useful to have different colours to indicate whether the connection speed is 10/100/1000Mb. All nine of them (1 x Power, 8 x Ports) are not too bright, but could have been arranged so that you can see them more easily when the router is mounted on a wall. As it is they are flush with the front panel and clear to appreciate when viewed face on.They have slots underneath to allow you to mount the switch on a wall. The PSU is small in size compared to my old switch, but more than adequate for the task.There appears to be plenty of ventilation provided by the slots. Neither of the two I have are too warm.Make sure that you have the correct Ethernet cable to go with them though. 1Gbit requires either Cat 5e or Cat 6 cable. If the computer or other network device only has a 10/100Mb LAN port, then normal Cat 5 cable will be sufficient.

Pet peeve with Amazon reviews in recent years: Amazon now bunch together similar devices and feedback on different sellers, so you might read wildly different comments because either a) the reviews concern different products or b) the sellers were different.In this case, you're in luck, since whether you're looking at the 5 Port or the 8 Port switch, I've bought and used both. And they both work exactly as you would expect an unmanaged switch to work: plug in the power cable, plug in some cat5e or better cable (assuming you want to take advantage of the gigabit capability of this hardware - if not, you could always buy a cheaper 10/100 switch... but if you're using wires in your home/small business network, you're either transferring/streaming video or providing network shared storage: either way, you really ought to be using gigabit switches and decent spec/quality cable) and you're good to go. Of course, I'm assuming you have at the very least one gigabit port on your router and more than one device (computer, console, whatever) with a gigabit port - otherwise you're wasting your time with this!Build quality is good, for the price - these plastic shells certainly aren't bomb proof, but they're sturdy enough for most sane applications. If you do choose to mount it to a wall - with the screw holes on the underside - or perch it somewhere high up, I'd strongly recommend ensuring the cables are either safely hidden away (or better yet, encased in trunking), or else some sort of snag/yank protection is used (ie clip the cables to the wall, with a little extra 'give' between the clip and the switch) - I suspect the switch would sustain most drops/knocks, but if I were you, I wouldn't risk finding out the hard way.If there's a drawback, it's the fact TP-Link have now launched their managed 'smart' switches, and for the price different (around £10), it seems like a worthwhile upgrade, just to be able to make sure priority traffic (such as video streaming from my NAS to one of the TVs) doesn't get held up by something less urgent (like cloud backup traffic). That said, if you're only using one or two of these switches to join up a few computers, consoles or other networked devices, it's hard to go too far wrong - just avoid daisy-chaining them, and like I said, make sure you've got good quality and spec cable runs.