I want to tell you about the most cost-effective upgrade I've made to my home studio in three years. It cost less than £40, it took ten minutes to set up, and it eliminated a problem that had been costing me hours every single week. It's a network switch. Specifically, it's a 2.5 gigabit network switch, and if you work with large files at home and you're still running a standard gigabit network, this is the upgrade you didn't know you needed.
My name is Callum. I'm 38, I live in Glasgow, and I work as a freelance video editor. My home studio has a workstation, two external monitors, a NAS drive where I store all my project files, and until recently, a standard gigabit network connecting all of it. Gigabit is fine for most things. It is not fine for transferring 4K video files between a workstation and a NAS drive while also trying to run a video call and download a client's latest footage. It creates bottlenecks. Slow, frustrating, productivity-destroying bottlenecks.
The Problem
A gigabit connection transfers data at a theoretical maximum of 1 gigabit per second — about 125 megabytes per second in practice. For a 4K video file that's 20 gigabytes, that's a transfer time of around two and a half minutes. Multiply that by the number of times I move files between my workstation and NAS in a working day, and you're looking at a meaningful chunk of time spent watching progress bars.
The solution is 2.5 gigabit networking — 2.5 times the bandwidth of standard gigabit, which in practice means transfers that take two and a half minutes now take about a minute. My workstation and NAS both support 2.5G natively. The only thing stopping me from using it was my switch, which was a standard gigabit model. I needed a 2.5G switch.
I found the D-Link DMS-105 5-Port 2.5G Multi-Gigabit Unmanaged Desktop Switch on ALTOE and ordered it the same day.
Why the D-Link DMS-105
Five ports was exactly what I needed — workstation, NAS, a second computer I use for client calls, and two spare for future expansion. The unmanaged design was right for my use case: I don't need to configure VLANs or monitor traffic, I just need fast, reliable connectivity between devices. Plug and play, no software, no setup. That's what unmanaged means and that's what I wanted.
The fanless metal housing was also important. My studio is a converted spare bedroom and it's quiet — I record audio in there occasionally and I can't have a fan-cooled switch adding noise to the room. The DMS-105 runs completely silently, dissipates heat through the metal casing, and sits on my desk without making its presence known in any way.
The integrated QoS — Quality of Service — automatically prioritises critical traffic, which means my video calls stay smooth even when I'm simultaneously transferring a large file in the background. That's the kind of detail that makes a real difference in a working day.
Setting It Up
I unplugged my old switch, plugged in the DMS-105, connected my cables, and that was it. No software, no configuration, no drivers. The whole process took about ten minutes including the time it took me to reroute a cable that was slightly too short. The switch negotiated 2.5G connections with my workstation and NAS automatically.
I ran a file transfer immediately after setup. A 20GB project file that had previously taken two and a half minutes transferred in just under a minute. I ran it again to make sure. Same result. I sat back in my chair and felt the particular satisfaction of a problem that has been properly solved rather than worked around.
Several Months On
The switch has been running continuously since I installed it. It's silent, it runs cool, and it has never required any attention whatsoever. The QoS has worked exactly as described — I've had video calls with clients while simultaneously ingesting footage from a camera card and the call quality hasn't suffered once.
I've reclaimed probably an hour a week in time that was previously spent waiting for file transfers. Over a year that's fifty hours. For a freelancer billing by the day, that's a meaningful number. The switch paid for itself in the first week.
If you work with large files at home — video, photography, audio, design — and your network is still running at standard gigabit speeds, this is the upgrade that will make the most immediate difference to your workflow. It's not glamorous. It's a small metal box that sits on your desk. But what it does to your working day is significant.
You can find the D-Link DMS-105 5-Port 2.5G Multi-Gigabit Desktop Switch on ALTOE. Browse the Hubs & Switches collection for more options, explore the full Networking range, or take a look at the Electronics collection. The Latest Products collection always has something new worth discovering.
Upgrade the switch. Reclaim the hours.
— Callum Reid, Glasgow
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