Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Be aware that this switch exposes the management interface on all ports. There does not seem to be a way to turn this off. You should not use this switch in an exposed environment where you need more than password-based security (or if you are uncertain about how much to trust the security of inexpensive network gear firmware). For example, I purchased this to segment off a couple ports onto a VLAN as a pass-through for the Internet link on the outside of my home router. I wanted to be able to use the port-mirroring capability to inspect the traffic on the outside of my gateway/firewall. That would leave several ports available (configured on a separate VLAN) to use inside my firewall. There is no way to disable the management interface on those ports exposed outside of my firewall. Netgear is adamant in their forums that this is by design. If you use this properly secured inside your network, then it is a pretty nice switch. It has a lot of nice features for the price, and I expect it will work reliably (I'm generally a fan of Netgear equipment). The design around the management interface makes it unsuitable for use in some situations - that dropped my opinion to a 3-star level. The extra star was lost because this limitation is pretty much hidden. I shouldn't have to imagine arbitrary security deficiencies and then go and research to find out if a potential purchase has them.