For a while I only have one 2.5G device on the home network, which is the NIC on my work PC. Not much reason to upgrade as most of the traffic is internet traffic which is currently only 100Mbit. With the recent upgrade of the FreeBSD home server, I also upgraded the NIC from the venerable dual port Intel Pro/1000 to a newer generic FENVI Dual Port 2.5G Ethernet Card with Intel I226 Chip. With 2.5G becoming the new consumer networking speed, it was a good time as any to also upgrade the main switch to 2.5G.

D-Link DMS-F106TS 5 port 2.5G + 10G SFP+

Criteria was known brand for reliability, 5 ports, affordability and longevity. Settled on D-Link FMS106-TS 5 port 2.5G + 10G SFP+ port. There are a few other brands with almost identical setup and features. It's likely that a few brands are sourcing from a single OEM manufacturer.

The 10G SFP+ port provides future flexibility, where I might want to upgrade the main switch to 10G and repurpose the switch elsewhere at home with a 10G uplink.

Having been used to unmanaged switch, the only issue I ran into was VLAN tagging. This switch strips VLAN tags by default. Not knowing that, I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why VLANs were not working on the new switch, but working on the old 1GBe unmanaged switch. I have two VLANs, 500 for my ISP's pppoe setup, and 50 for an isolated IoT devices network such as the home's solar power inverter.

The configuration is relatively simple, you'll need to login to the switch's web management interface on 10.90.90.90 And enable the tagged VLANs on the ports you want them on.

I also bought a Zoerex 2.5G RJ45 SFP+ module to test and use the 6th SFP port. That works fine too, connecting to downstream 1GBe 8 port switch. Was quite impressed with the quality of the SFP+ module.

So far everything is running smoothly with no issues. Though the only noticeable difference is the speed up in moving files between my workstation and the home server.