Performance

To measure the performance of the switch, we used a Thecus N5810 Pro NAS equipped with five HDDs (Seagate ST500DM005) in RAID 6. This NAS has five Ethernet ports that can be teamed for up to 5 Gbit speeds; however, we cannot exploit the feature since the GSS116E switch doesn't support dynamic LAG.

We chose to compare the GSS116E to a TL-SG3216 switch by TP-LINK with 16-ports and support for dynamic LAG for only another 40 bucks. The only major disadvantage of the TL-SG3216 as compared to Netgear's offering is its increased footprint. Since we cannot team the ports of our NAS with the GSS116E, we conducted all the tests with a single Ethernet port only, which ensures that both switches are tested under the same exact conditions.


The above screenshot covers the problems we came across once we tried to enable the port trunking option of our Synology NAS while it was connected to the GSS116E.


The Netgear switch looks to offer slightly higher network transfer speeds than the TP-LINK switch.


The TP-LINK switch easily took the lead in the response-time tests.

Power Consumption

Let us now check on just how much power the GSS116E needs in idle and during heavy throughput.

We use a GW Instek GPM-8212 power analyzer for all of our power consumption measurements.



This switch has very low energy requirements, so it won't affect your electricity bills significantly even if you have it operate around the clock.