Managed or Unmanaged Switch?

[Jake72]

What are the Benefits of a Managed POE switch vs a Unmanaged POE switch?

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you want to tailor your network traffic for QoS, redundancy, port speed, etc, where you want more priority/reliability for certain computers, then get a managed switch. If you don't care, then get an unmanaged switch.

[Jake72]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If you want to tailor your network traffic for QoS, redundancy, port speed, etc, where you want more priority/reliability for certain computers, then get a managed switch. If you don't care, then get an unmanaged switch.

OK all I want to do is send a signals to 2 Ubiquiti Unifi Ap-AC Lite APs my PC Printers, Raid 5 storage.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, Jake72 said:

OK all I want to do is send a signals to 2 Ubiquiti Unifi Ap-AC Lite APs my PC Printers, Raid 5 storage.

Then get an unmanaged switch.

[brwainer]

a managed POE switch (or even just a "smart" one) will let you remotely disable the power on individual ports, which is useful in case you need to reboot a single AP and don't want to get up from your chair (and depending on the specifics, sometimes drive tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles to fix that one device)

[NZLaurence]

For your average user managed switches only really do a couple of things. For a home user there is no need for a managed switch unless you need vlans.

 

Vlans, if you don't know what they are you probably don't need them it basiclly they allow you to carve up a physical switch into virtual switches to create multiple networks (note each network needs it's own router, dhcp and so on).

 

To see the up/down state of each port, useful for remote troubleshooting.

 

Disable ports or lock them to specific devices for security.

 

Bond multiple ports to provide more bandwidth to connections to other switches/servers.

[Unhelpful]

3 hours ago, sambarrett23072 said:

General rule for EVERYONE. If you don't know the difference, get an unmanaged switch.

That's stupid. If you don't know the difference and you're interested in tech (we're all on these forums), get one and learn.