Hey all, I have been running unraid for a long time and know getting the house hard wired for ethernet as I am sick of cable rolling around the house and buffering 1080p over wireless.

 

We are getting around 3 -4 hard wired ethernet outlets in each of our rooms all of which are being wired back to a 24 port patch panel in a 6RU cabinet.

 

I am looking for some recommendations for the following -

 

1) A decent quality switch. Don't want to spend a fortune but also don't want junk. Its going in a 6RU cabinet?

 

2) For the standard home setup will have the unraid server + all home devices connected to the one switch degrade performance both internally and externally to the LAN?

 

Any help appreciated!

Don't skimp on the switch.  You're spending good $$ to have everything wired ... so spend the $$ to get a high quality switch.    Unmanaged is okay for a home setup, although you may be able to find a used managed Gb switch on e-bay for not much extra (which would be tempting).

 

One switch is fine for all your devices.

 

I suspect you're already doing this ...

 

... but be sure you use Cat-6 cables, and get a Gb switch 

Just be sure that rack and the closet is cooled!  Any 24-port switch will be generating heat and if it gets hot, its life and, perhaps, performance will be degraded.  (I am assuming that more than just the switch is going to be in that 6RU cabinet. ---Since that is a bit of overkill for the termination of only *24* cat-6 cables.)

What makes a good quality unmanaged switch?

 

I just bought one of these, as far as I could tell most of them are the same until you get into ones that you can manage?

What makes a good quality unmanaged switch?

 

I just bought one of these, as far as I could tell most of them are the same until you get into ones that you can manage?

 

That switch is fine for home use.  Key things to look at are the buffer size (probably the most important);  size of the MAC address table; whether it supports jumbo frames; and whether or not it has QOS support.  Realistically, just about any switch will work well in unmanaged environments, as long as there's a large enough buffer (512kb is a bit on the small side ... especially if all of your connected devices are Gb).  "Green" switches are more power efficient, but can also introduce a tiny amount of delay time when a transfer involves a powered-down port.