The Sodola SL902-SWTGW218AS

As part of my never-ending home and homelab renovations, I decided to bring my network infrastructure into the 2020s. I had been planning for this for a while, so I was keeping tabs on promotions and ended up buying four of these switches last month on sale.

Disclaimer: Although I’ve reviewed Sodola switches in the past, I acquired these off Amazon with my own money. But to avoid any misinterpretation, I’m following my review policy.

I bought these because I have been quite happy with the ones I reviewed, and replacing the TP-link ones I was still using was making an increasing amount of sense:

• I now have more machines with 2.5Gb interfaces than gigabit ones, and some with 10Gb
• I was planning to upgrade my Wi-Fi setup and move away from my five Airport Extremes, and having faster switches would remove any bottlenecks
• And, finally, I have been planning to upgrade my fiber connection beyond gigabit, which also meant that the existing switches would just slow things down

Like one of the models I reviewed before, these are nine-port switches (eight 2.5Gb ports plus an SFP+ slot for a 10Gb module), and tearing one of them down revealed a very similar board:

The tear-down itself was a bit more involved than usual, but solely because there are screws on both sides of the case. The marketing materials highlight the aluminum case as being a factor in heat dissipation, and I’m inclined to agree, since the bottom of the switch is enfolded by the cover, which gives it a bit more thermal mass.

These ship with a tiny EC-rated 12V/1A wall wart, and I’ve yet to see them go past 2-3W (although I am not monitoring all of them). I will update this as I do more testing.

The Web UI is a slightly more refined and reorganized version of the other devices I tested, and the feature set is comparable:

I have done some cursory testing and my VLAN setup works, but since we are doing some major changes to the rest of our home networking I will likely post some dedicated notes on that later.

Given that I mentioned magnets in my original review, I found it quite amusing that Sodola provides you with four cute little magnetic feet that can hold the switch quite firmly against a steel cabinet, although I quickly whipped up a couple of PLA brackets to test convection cooling (leaving 15-20mm under the switch is enough for airflow):

If you’re into the 10-inch rack craze, you’ll be happy to know that there is a 10-inch rack mount for this model, which I used to mount one of them using the vertical brackets I designed last weekend. I will be tweaking the mount to improve cooling, but it’s OK for now:

Of course, I had to check the thermals in practice, which I’ve been doing over the past few days. My conclusion is that the aluminum casing might look flimsy, but it does seem to help dissipate heat.

The scenarios I’ve tried are:

• Mounted vertically with the supplied magnets (oriented to take advantage of convection cooling through the grilles). With 7 of its 2.5Gb ports active, my infrared thermometer reports it running between 35-37°C on the “top” surface, with the top exhaust registering somewhere between 39-40°C depending on time of day (with an indoors ambient temperature of 28-29°C).
• The rack-mounted one (with just 3 ports active and mounted with the ports facing up) has been running steadily at 35°C.
• The one I’m using for testing atop my desk, laid down flat, is at 32°C with a single port connected.

So thermals will certainly vary depending on use and mounting. With minor air cooling (and if you can mount them vertically), I don’t see any reason for concern, although I’ve yet to test these with a 10Gb module for extended periods of time. So the jury is still out on what a RJ45 SFP+ will do (although all the ones I’ve used in the past ran at least at 60°C).

I’m pretty happy with these so far (especially considering that I paid for them). Physically, they are very compact and easy to mount, and I like that I can have all the connectors facing the same way. The only physical characteristic that’s somewhat missing are screw mounting slots (the magnets don’t help if all you have is a wall), but otherwise I have no complaints about cooling even though it’s been 28-30°C indoors where they’re mounted.

Software-wise, everything I need seems to be there, even if I am now on an almost completely “flat” network with (almost) no VLANs. I will be going into that later (as well as setting up one with a 10Gb SFP+) and will update this post with any follow-ups.