SMC EZ Switch 10/100 8 Port Switch

Part of my responsibilities at work is to conduct some fairly extensive software testing each time we enhance our software.  For this reason, I have six separate PCs in my office so that we can be sure that our program is thoroughly tested on a variety of platforms before it's released to our clients.  In order to share my single network connection amongst all six of those PCs, I was given an SMC EZ Switch 10/100 8 Port Switch.

Since the day it was installed about three years ago, this switch has been running constantly, day and night, everyday of the week.  During that time, the only issue I've encountered with it is a failure with one of the ports (port #2, I believe).  If I was originally using all eight of the ports, a failure with one of them could have caused me quite a bit of difficulty.  For me, though, this was not a major problem, because I still had seven other functional ports to use and I was able to just swap the cable from the failed port to one of the unused ones.

Attaching a new PC to this switch is very easy.  It only requires me to plug a network cable from the switch to the PC that I want to attach to the network.  Aside from the failure with that one port, the switch has worked great for me.  With it in place, I'm able to transfer large files across our network, and access the databases running on our various servers, very quickly and easily.

Like just about every other device I use at work, this switch was assigned to me by our IT department, and I was not given a choice as to which brand or model that they would use.  All in all, I'd have to say that I'm quite happy with the SMC switch that they chose.