D-Link DGS-1005D/B 5-Port Green Ethernet Gigabit Desktop Switch

Bought this since I'd run out of switch ports on my small office network. Works perfectly and being unmanaged needs no installation or set-up (short of plugging it in to an available socket and attaching your patch leads). The switch autosenses 10/100/1000 connections and indicates the connection speed on its LED display. My two main computers are aging Pentium4s with UDMA6/ATA133 controllers/disks. My structured cabling is 100 Mbit CAT5 (not CAT5E). I bought a gigabit switch for future proofing but didn't expect any significant performance improvement because of storage bottlenecks and cabling limitations. I was pleasantly surprised when the switch's LEDs reported it was game to try gigabit throughput. Qcheck reports a throughput of 727Mbps although the 1kB data limit seems too low for a reliable test at this speed. More importantly, I'm getting a real world throughput of 250 - 350 Mbps (disk to disk). In use, file transfers have speeded up noticeably and my network backups (30 gigabytes) are completing 25% faster than before. Since the switch drops its power consumption when idle I'm saving power. For me the cheap, white plastic case isn't too easy on the eye (I prefer Netgear's Prosafe metal cases) but other than that I have no complaints. I've had mixed reliability from Dlink products in the past but I'm prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt and recommend this for the cost (27GBP when I bought it).