Home > Consumer Reviews > Netgear GS608 8 Port Gigabit Desktop Switch

Always liked netgear equipment, its always easy to set-up and "does what it says on the tin"
Simply plug a cross over LAN cable from one of your router LAN connections and the other into one of the hub ports and hey presto an extra 7 LAN connections, no set-up or anything.
Only bad thing I can say is it doesn't actually tell you to use a cross over cable, being a network engineer I just automatically assumed it needed one, it may not, as it could auto detect the cable, but would of thought it should mention something one way or the other

Amendment
OK couldn't help wondering about the LAN cable, tested with normal cable and yes it auto detects cable and still works.
so don't need cross over cable.

As others have said, nothing could be easier to install. Just plug in your cables and off you go.

Also the data transfer speed is astonishing.

Paul

I have one of these myself and they are excellent. Netgear's other consumer products aren't as robust, and are very basic for a great deal of money.

I haven't had to reboot my 5 or 8 port netgear gigabit switches once.

The transfer speeds are very good, but it depends on your cabling. Make sure you go with Cat 6, I have Cat5e Structured cabling in the house and whilst fast doesn't quite hit the true gigabit speeds of Cat 6. Also make sure that you have a gigabit NIC (network card) otherwise you're throwing your money away,

AVOID Linksys high-end units at all costs! They have excellent feature sets but the more expensive units don't have the Firmware to back it up and as a result fail. If you want Linksys go with a WAG model.

Netgear's expensive units work OKish but are seriously limited in their feature-set.

I had a speedtouch modem/router with a 4 port wired LAN. This system was connected to my own computer, my wife's comp and then my daughter's and son's comp in other rooms around the house. Now this was great until the past year when my son wanted to connect his play-station into the network, I also had obtained another computer and then I purchased a new HD TV which had a LAN connection for streaming video, photo and music from your PC via the homenetwork to you Sony TV in the lounge. If that was not bad enough, I got a blue-ray DVD player for Xmas which also had a LAN connection to connect to the internet to gain extra content and download updates etc. In a matter on months I didn't need 4 LAN ports on my system anymore I needed another 4 making 8.

This is where the GS608 came in. I had read it was a great piece of kit and very easy to set up. It arrived, I connected one LAN socket to the existing LAN socket on the speedtouch modem/router and connected 7 computers to it. Within minutes all were connected to the internet/network and I can now exchange files across all formats. Great. Just what I wanted. So easy!

The machine is 1gig speed as well so transfer of files between computers is mega-fast.

I would recommend this unit without hesitation.

Hope this helps.
Colin.

The hardware works perfectly straight out of the box, just hook up the cabling and off you go without any configuration at all.

With such a simple product it is astonishing that Netgear failed producing any documentation at all supplied with the product or on their support site about what the colour of the LED indicators mean. It took me more than 10 minutes of googling to find out and then found it in a review on amazon.com...

Green: 1000 Mbit
Yellow: 10/100 Mbit

With that piece of info in the documentation or on the support site I would have given 5 stars.