TRENDnet 5-port Unmanaged 2.5G Switch review - Introduction

TRENDnet TEG-S350 5-Port 2.5G Switch Unmanaged
5 port 10/100/1000/2500 Mbit/s Fast Ethernet Desktop Switch

Price: ~ $110 EUR/USD - Trendnet

We review the TEG-S350 switch from TRENDnet. We've been evangelizing for years now to achieve faster Ethernet. That trend has started towards PC motherboards, NAS units, and routers; but lagging behind are affordable multi GigE switches, and yeah we're not sure why?

Here in my office we already made to move towards 10 GigE, it's very expensive to do so though, but the limiting factors are the (expensive) switches. Older model 10 GigE are all-optical/fiber-connected. That's now going to work in for your home-based situation, to the transition towards RJ45 was mandatory> slowly but steadily that is now making its way to the market.

Today we test a TRENDnet TEG-S350 5-Port 2.5G. While still expensive and not up there matching 10G speeds, this might be a nice alternative., Available in 5 and an 8 port version, all ports offer full-duplex 2.5G RJ-45 jacks. And that means your traditional CAT5E and better cabling will support these speeds just fine. The current 1 Gigabit standard has a throughput of a maximum of 128 MB/sec minus fault tolerance and things like QoS. This year it seems mother motherboards and NAS units all are fitted with 2.5G connectors. And that means this could be a sweet spot switch as all connectors offer 2.5G connectivity, bringing your throughput towards 312 MB/sec minus fault tolerances and the rest.

The household in 2021 has changed quite a bit. Everything is connected, lots of folks have a NAS at home as centralized energy-friendly storage for all their file and locally stored streaming activity. Copying ask an MKV file towards your NAS typically yielded 120 MB/sec right? Well with a compatible PC and NAS properly you can now reach that 300 MB/sec marker. And while I would have liked 5G to become the standard, that already is a massive improvement. 

No, we do have a slight fetish for network equipment. When you take that freshly painted hot-rod game machine you've spent dozens of hours building to a LAN party, you have to hook it up to a? LAN. Yup. It's hard to play games these days without a network of some kind.

The TRENDnet TEG-S350 is your usual thin, square metal box that one imagines when you think about network equipment. It's about the size of the power brick for a laptop or about two times bigger than the mouse you're waving around. The temptation for here is the cost per port, which is about $22. Throw in a few of the neat features like port trunking and 25Gbps switching capacity support, and you've got a pretty handy, somewhat affordable, switch.