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.

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.

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.

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.

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!