YuanLEy Switch with 2.5 and 10GBit Ports

As you know, the UGreen DXP 4880 NAS system has a 10GbE port in addition to its 2.5 GbE connection, which I wanted to utilize, or at least have a faster connection.

Introduction

After my experiments with a 10GbE network card, I stuck with the 5GbE USB-C adapter because the speed advantage of a 10GbE card isn’t that significant. Up until now, I’ve been using a direct connection between my MacBook and the NAS.

However, this requires the 10GbE connection to be on a different network than the one used for everything else. You also have to configure a gateway for the other network in UGOS, otherwise the interface can’t be configured, which can lead to problems if the gateway doesn’t exist.

However, this requires the 10GbE connection to be on a different network than the one used for everything else. I recorded a video about it:

The Switch

There are now quite a few switches that have one or more 10GbE ports, all for under €100.

When I saw the packaging, I initially thought I’d been sent the wrong one, but after unpacking it, everything was correct.

The switch has four 2.5GbE ports and two 10GbE ports, the latter with RJ45 connectors. I had previously done a comparison, but with a model that had two 10GbE SFP+ ports. However, that didn’t work at all with the 10GbE SFP+ modules.

Throughput and Power Consumption

I’m quite satisfied with the switch’s performance. An iperf3 measurement shows approximately 4.7 GbE, and the throughput with CrystalDiskMark, at over 500 MB/sec, is more than acceptable. The fact that the read speeds are consistently stable is likely due to the NVMe cache of the UGOS NAS.

Blackmagic’s disk speed test shows slightly lower values, just under 400 MB/s, but these are perfectly acceptable.

The QNAP switch consumes approximately 6 W of power when all ports are in use. The YuanLey consumes about 9 W, but it’s important to consider that two of its ports are 10 Gbps and it also has one more port overall.

Conclusion

I’m satisfied with the YuanLey, and it delivers the performance one would expect from a 5 Gbps adapter. Perhaps I’ll finally decide to get a 10 Gbps card for my Windows PC.

ciao tuxoche