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Comment by justinclift | Hacker News Reader

> An alternative was to use commercial-grade network switches with 16 ports but that was obviously was out of the question (and budget).

Ebay?

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Thanks for the tip. I did consider Ebay, but at that point, I figured it was more trouble than it's worth if I bought them used. Ebay doesn't exactly have the best reputation.

Ahhh. I guess it depends on what you're looking for.

Mellanox cards and related cabling is generally still pretty good (in UK and Australia anyway).

A few years ago I obtained a few 24 port HP Procurve switches (3400cl-24G), with 10GbE (CX4 connectors) on the back.

Those worked pretty well, though turned out to be slightly too noisy for use as desktop switches. ;)

Taking a quick look on US Ebay now, something like this (US$39) might have been workable:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-J9145A-ProCurve-2910al-24G-Ether...

I don't know that seller at all, but ex-enterprise HP Procurve gear should generally be pretty safe. From reputable vendors anyway. :)

For Singapore, I'm not sure. Might have needed to get something from the US shipped over. This one seems like it'd be ~US$80 including shipping, which was probably too much:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProCurve-Switch-1800-24G-switch-...

To help with the noise try replacing the fans with high quality ones. I threw some nocturnas into an old managed dell switch and it quieted down immensely.

Just be aware that sometimes they change the pins around from the standard pinout, I blew out one of the fans before discovering this. Fan still works, just lost the rpm monitoring :(

Server fans are not cheap, they’re smaller and faster. Look at current and CFM rating. They might look insane from DIY market figures.

Thanks, very much agree.

I took a naive approach to it before having any clue about electronics, just replacing one of the (3) internal fans with a quieter one of the same voltage. Mostly to see if that would work.

While it functioned, the "fan warning" light was then permanently on (with the replacement fan in).

If I still had the gear and were to do it again, I'd investigate properly and figure out a real solution. :)

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