CONCLUSION

   QNAP may not have a long history when it comes to switches (quite the opposite frankly) but having manufactured most of the top NAS models in the market over the years has allowed them to release a great little NAS. Of course the QSW-804-4C is only little in size since as you can tell from our charts it has nothing to fear compared to larger models like the XS712T by Netgear. Sure to be fair the XS712T has been around for roughly 5 years so it’s not exactly state-of-the-art (we’ll reach out to Netgear to see if we can get one of their latest ones to review) but back then things couldn’t get much better than that. So having a much smaller 10GbE switch with even higher performance levels compared to one such model is a win in or book. Still performance and size are not the only two things going for the QSW-804-4C since both power consumption and noise levels are also very low. Sure its two 40mm exhaust fans have the potential to go even faster so they may get louder under warmer conditions but the same applies for all the switches we’ve used in the past. For us the single drawback of this unit is its lack of any PoE+ ports and although people looking for a 10GbE switch may not have much use for that there are always exceptions (so we do hope QNAP addresses that issue in upcoming models).

   Price is yet another thing going for the QSW-804-4C 10G Switch by QNAP since it currently retails for just USD489 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 432Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de). Now there are many 10G compatible switches in the market today (some even cheaper but with fewer ports) but most of them don’t support the 10GBASE-T and NBASE-T standards so that’s also something to keep in mind. So leaving out the lack of PoE+ ports we really liked everything else about the QSW-804-4C and that’s why it gets our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Compact Size
- Excellent Performance
- 4 SFP+, 4 RJ45 & 4 RJ45/SFP+ Combo Ports
- 160Gbps Maximum Switching Capacity
- Low Power Consumption & Noise Levels
- Price (For Some)

CONS

- No PoE+ Ports (For Some)