Several quarters ago we showed off upcoming 10GbE and 40GbE products from MikroTik. One of the most anticipated for our readers was the MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN (then called the (MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+PC.) About three quarters later, we finally have on in our lab. Since there is a backlog of review content coming out on STH this quarter, my review of the MikroTik CRS309-8S+IN is going to have to wait until next quarter. In the meantime, our editor-in-chief, Patrick, did a short video showing off the unit. You can buy them at retail today and so we wanted to show our STH community sooner than waiting for the formal review.
MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN Overview and Unboxing
Here is the video Patrick made before dropping this switch in the mail to me.
Key stats here are that the MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+IN, even with the “IN” for desktop chassis, has an offset rackmount ear setup to allow mounting the unit in a standard 19″ 2-post rack.
Power consumption is rated at only 23W and the switch itself MSRP is $270. That makes it easy to afford both on an ongoing basis and on the initial purchase price.
With such low power consumption, the switch does not need fans, but it has a large heatsink that can be seen in the video. Without fans, this 8x SFP+ 10GbE switch is silent.
Performance wise, the official table is in there. As a basic L2 switch it is spec’d to do around line rate. The switch’s spec sheet also says that it has a number of advanced features. Enabling some of the L3 features degrades performance significantly. We balance that with the fact that it is a $270, silent, 8x SFP+ 10GbE switch that sips power. At that price and power level, we are willing to consider this as a L2 switch and our full review will consider it as such.
Hmm, as much as I’m not a fan of Mikotik over how they ignore some of their customers [1], this is really quite a tempting switch. AFAICT the first manufacturer to offer fanless 8 port 10GbE.
[1] I could go on at length, but my biggest bug bear is the lack of OpenVPN over UDP support in their routers. And they spun the largest steaming pile of excuses, rather than just enabling it in their build scripts.
..so its routing abilities effectively cripple the bandwidth… they should have just labelled it “The Slow Cloud Router”… I wonder how this crippling compares to D-Link’s 4-SFP+ port consumer offerings… Patrick would you have time to do a routing comparison between this and another consumer offering albeit half the number of SFP+ ports?
L2 is fine for a SOHO or small office setup. If I was not running Infiniband I would consider this switch fot 10gigE. The amount of tome it has taken for 10gigE to come diwnn to the consumer market is shameful.
I just got one of these yesterday. Haven’t had time to do much with it yet, but it seemed like a good option for simple 10Gb switching. I’m actually powering it via. a little Ubiquiti PoE switch sitting next to it, which also acts as a bridge to my 1Gb network. I did some firmware updates, then switched it to boot into SwitchOS mode instead of RouterOS mode.
As a tip for some of ya’ll… just know that the MAC changes on that 1Gb port when you switch modes. This caused me a bit of confusion since I’d already created a DHCP reservation for it, so the IP changed after I restarted it. I’m curious about the performance differences between the two OS modes if I’m not actually using any of the routing/LAG features. SwOS seems pretty barebones, but it’s probably sufficient for my homelab.
I’ve got two of them racked for a production upgrade at work. Waiting on the rest of the gear. The only issue I have is the rack ears (specifically the longer one) seem pretty flexible and plugging a DAC or 1Gbe cable in mean you have to hold the switch to keep it from moving.
Does anyone know if/how these “almost seems too good to be true” Mikrotik 10G switches fare when used with any of the more recent *copper* 10Gbase-T SFP+ modules that have been popping up of late, like, say, https://www.optcore.net/product/10gbase-t-copper-30m-rj45-sfp-transceiver ? I suddenly find my hands on 7 8P8C 10G devices now? And there doesn’t really seem to be anyone really catering to the (now all the rage? better 15 years late, than never?) 10G copper ethernet market. Netgear has a couple switches with one or two 10G copper ports but they’re more routers than switches; the backplanes are severely blocking. Unless I’m missing something? Any other tips?