Looking for a nice switch!

jahonix

…Quanta LB4M...

From the amount of fans on the back I assume it to be quite noisy and to consume an amount of power that hardly justifies the cheap price as compared to power costs over uptime. Over here in Germany electricity is expensive. YMMV.

Visseroth

My understanding is they are about 70W. I'll confirm this once it hits the bench and from what I've read the fans are about 60db, so yea, noisy. Some people have disconnected the fans and modded the top of the case and put a slim 120mm fan to move the air silently.

But i agree, for something running 24/7 and pulling any decent amount of power, it hurts the electrical bill.

I got it because it was inexpensive as I'm on a budget, but yea, if it's pulling anything near 100W, forget it, I'll sell it to someone else that is willing to front that bill.

I've been seriously considering putting a 12v battery bank in and running everything off a 12v power supply. The 12v battery bank would give me a uninterruptible power supply and some of the new micro systems out these days have decent performance and can run off a 12v supply. Though a decent switch would be harder to come by.
Basically doing a 12v, 24v or 48v system eliminates the 120 or 220v AC to DC conversion from the equation as there is usually a 10 to 30% loss in conversion. All the converting would be done at 1 power supply, so less loss, less heat, ect. Something the server farms over here are starting to do. Direct DC delivery.

But I agree, power is expensive and over here is getting expensive too. I'll throw the Quanta on the bench and let you guys know.

Visseroth

So I fired it up. Sounds like it's about 35 to 40db. Not to bad if you're not in a quiet room but definitely makes a LOT of noise on startup. Sounds like any other server on startup. Screams like a 747, then idles down.

Seems to idle at about 63Watts according to my watt meter. 63Watts isn't a lot but it isn't a little either and that's just with one power supply. Even with only one power supply installed it's 63 watts.

Anyone know what the Cisco 300 idles at or any of the other suggested switches with 10Gb?

BTW, I'm not trying to hijack the thread, just as curious as the creator of the thread as I'm also in the market for a decent switch but I don't want to spend 1,200 getting one either :P