Comment Re:So much power waste (Score 1) 287
If you look closely at those pictures, in pretty much every rack there are redundant switches with absolutely nothing connected to them, yet they are powered on.
Really? Do you like the blinking lights? I measured my 24 port 3com superstack switch and it was 50 watts. I switched to a 8 port low power gigabit (i have 6 devices these days) and it runs at 8watts.
Calculating the cost savings of the switch, at
Yep, managed switches seem to be outrageously power hungry. In my cabinet I've got:
- Satellite patch panel (wired to the dish)
- 24 port 8p8c patch panel (wired to sockets in the rest of the house/office)
- 24 port managed gigabit switch
- Test machine which is completely underpowered and never turned on (at some point I'll get around to removing it from the cabinet)
- Sheevaplug
- USB hard drive for Sheevaplug
- VDSL modem
- VoIP/POTS gateway
- USB DVB-S2 receiver
- RIPE Atlas probe
- PoE injectors for 2 wireless APs that are dotted around the house
- Far too many PSUs for all of the above! (Although I have consolidated all the 12v supplies into a single PSU with multiple connectors. I've still got stuff that needs 9v and 5v supplies though)
The total draw is about 90 watts, probably about 50% of it going to the managed switch! About 25% goes to the hard drive I guess.
If anyone has any recommendations for 24 port managed switches that don't draw silly amounts of power when idle, I'd be interested (bonus points if they have some PoE ports).
The other problem I have is that no devices seem to be able to roam between APs sensibly - if I move from the house to the office my phone and laptop try to hold onto the incredibly weak signal from the house AP even though there's an AP in the office for them to use. I have to toggle the wifi off and on again to get them to reassociate. (And vice-versa when I move back into the house).