As part of my home network revamp I decided to by a new gigabit switch to replace the old Netgear GS608, which was acting up. I extended its life some years ago by replacing some caps but recently it had started to intermittently drop back some ports back to 100Mbit. Plus, I always disliked how hot it got, and the power brick got hot too. So I bought a nice TP-Link SG1008, just over £26 from Amazon...
http://uk.tp-link.com/products/details/?categoryid=224&model=TL-SG1008It's a very nice professional-looking bit of kit, solid steel rack-mountable/desktop case, with internal PSU and normal kettle mains lead. But best of all, I have measured power consumption
reduced from the Netgear's 7W to 2W And that's with six gigabit ports active. Once the power-savers kick in on the connected devices and they sleep, the switch's power draw drops to
just 1 Watt!
These figures are from a cheap plug in power meter so can't guarantee accuracy, but I've not caught it out telling any other fibs.
Normally I'm cynical of what I call the 'green bandwagon' which mainly seems to contrive to maximise profits by preying on the conscience of those worried by climate change, selling pointless 'energy saving' devices which usually don't save any energy at all, and are always packed in bright green boxes which puts my back up all the more. But credit where credit's due, this is a huge improvement over its predecessor. And it came in a pleasant blue/white box, rather than a green one.
PS I see they are no longer available from amazon UK, only from the merchants and costing more. Maybe I got the last one? But I'm sure it'll be available elsewhere at similar price I paid.