Netgears GS605 offers a stylish alternative to having gigabit Ethernet in the home. I spent a lot of time looking for a retailer who stocked this item and eventually I ended up shopping with MicroDirect after Misco sent me a GS105 (the GS605's business brother) in error. I'm quite fond of Netgears home networking equipment and my entire home network currently uses solely Netgear products.
The GS605 is the same size as all Netgears current line of home products that feature the platinum white casing. The product I obtained was silently different than advertised in that it had a silver reflective lining around the front panel instead of the traditional white used on all of the other platinum white products. The GS605 is also considerably heavier than both the DG834 router and the WG602 access point, most likely due to a greater amount of electronics.
Included with the switch was its vertical stand, the power adapter and installation guide. The step by step installation guide was detailed and to the point, it included a number of diagrams and had images of the items contained with the box for verification purposes.
You have the option of setting the GS605 in its standing or sitting down position, I like the stands so I set it up with the stands! The stands can be slightly fiddly to attach at first, but there's a knack to it.
Setting up any home switch such as this one is rather simple, and is just a question of plugging some Ethernet cable in the back of each computer and then plugging the other end into the ports on the switch, and finally powering up the switch. If the switch is connected to a device with DHCP such as a router then you are all done and your OS will use this to configure the IP Addressing, otherwise you may have to set up IP Addressing manually but it's no hard deal. Note however that with the GS605 you won't obtain gigabit speeds on the network unless each machine is equipped with a gigabit Ethernet card and is then plugged into the switch with a Cat5e or Cat6 Ethernet cable - Cat5 doesn't support gigabit speeds. All of the ports on the GS605 support Auto Uplink so you don't need to worry about what type of Ethernet cable to use, although to conform to standards I used straight-through cabling for all connections to computers.
When connected Gigabit devices light up on the switch with a green status indicator and the 100M/10M devices light up with an amber status indicator. The switch operates completely silent and doesn't make that horrid high-pitched whining sound which I have heard on many other switches and other network devices.
I run the switch 24 hours a day 7 days a week and it has never crashed or powered down on me unexpectedly. I always obtain the highest transfer speeds between my two gigabit computers, I've never obtained a gigabit transfer because the two machines don't have hard drives fast enough to do so, they both max in at around 60MB/s so this is the fastest I've ever seen the network go. Also note that with any networks the 100M or the 1000M doesn't mean megabytes per second it means megabits per second so this has to be divided by 8 (8 bits to the byte) for the understandable speed, which on gigabit networks is 125MB/s.
Linkspeed.exe provided with the Windows 2003 Server resource kit reports the connection between my two gigabit machines as 953Mbps. I can copy a 700MB file between the two computers in around 10-12 seconds, which would have taken nearly a minute on a 100M network. So when I'm transferring files of around 3 GB I really do see the benefit of the gigabit network.
When I first saw gigabit Ethernet coming into the home market I always thought to myself why bother with that, it's too fast. But as technology continues on advancing we are requiring more and more storage space for larger files, which often need to be transferred between computers and networks!
For anyone who requires that little bit of extra speed in the home and is also ready for the extra cost a gigabit network brings by all means go and ahead and this product, it's stylish and performs its job flawlessly.
**Putting Satisfactory for manufacturer support as I've had no dealings with Netgear concerning this product.**
More details
Stability
Very stable
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Satisfactory
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