MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN 10G Switch Setup Review With VLANS 

Power electronics engineer here.....Those are not 'solid state' caps, they are still electrolytic low ESR polymer types. The polymers are quite reliable, but still do not have the life span of MLCC types but are a good compromise from the expense of using MLCC's for the whole design. The life of the aluminum electrolytic is hugely determined by the brand and the model chosen. The higher-end brands with high temp ratings will last far longer than the usefulness of the switch even if they get rather toasty in 24/7 service. The generic/knock-off versions are total unknowns but generally a small fraction of the lifetime. Hopefully this manufacture did not cheap out on caps to get the BOM cost at a target set by the marketing department. As a hobby, I repair every imaginable high-tech high-end devices and the cheap off-brand aluminum electrolytic caps are responsible for a very high percentage of failures. In general, they do not instantly go bad but rather degrade. Depending on the design of the circuit, the degradation on a PDN system generally compromises the stability of the power. That creates noise that ends up in the signals as errors that get worse and worse over time. The errors are usually random and appear to be related to some other configuration issue - sending people on wild goose chases.

The capacitors should be fine as long as they're name brand and are rated for 105*C. The "solid state" caps you pointed out are not solid state, they're typical electrolytic caps in a SMD package.

Finally! I am glad that you did review of MikrotTik product.

I'm running a Mikrotik 309 8 port10G switch and it's been here for 6 months. Not bad, does what it says on the tin. No complaints.

Buy a Mikrotic, they said. You can control everything and it's cheap, they said. That thing has so many options I didn't know how to make anything beyond turning it on.

I like the status lights being located on the side. I use this as a multi point transceiver joining multiple fiber legs together. Having it DIN mounted and seeing the lights when I open the cabinet is a plus. Also, powering with active POE (803.3at switch) with no problems.

It's been on my wish list for a long time, among things. Good to see little review.

Huge thanks! I'm on the verge of setting up my first TrueNAS server for digital photography / video editing and archiving and planned to use 10 GbE connections. I'm using this unit for exactly all of the reasons you mention. Thanks for the walk through! Cheers, mate! J

I have the 8 port version and it has been solid for over 6 months. Picked it up new on ebay for under $240. Best purchase I have made for my homelab.

Deploying a few of these today, nice walk through Tom!

Nice switch. Reliable. Fast. Using it since a year or so.

thank u this shows how the 10 gb network works a little bit better of understanding it - I am in the slow process of upgrading to 10gb network - I have the 10gb switch with 4 & 24 1 gb on it - I got this for about 60 bucks ebay used - my other switch the two 10 gb are broken when I got it, so this was the replacement - and all the cable names where hard to find

I have one of these switches. Great for the price and never had an issue with it.

Haven't seen this switch before. Thanks for the review 👍

Nice little device for the price. Might have to get one to test and play around with. Thanks for the informational video Tom!

It's bigger 8 port brother does have a rack-mount option

Good video. Running arch i threw on wine and got winbox running which was scary easy. Usually i expect something like that to put up more of a fight. Also the web config seems to mimic the winbox interface.

Been using mine a year now. Love it.

The 10GBaseT SFP+ module shows 10G to the host side interface at all times, because it is always running XFI. The device utilizes flow control when the interfaces are mismatched. This allows 1G/2.5G/5G/10G (if yours supports 2.5/5) when the host does not support the newer autoneg mechanisms in USXGMII (which coincidentally also runs 10G all the time, but duplicates the data 10x for 1G, the same as SGMII did to run 10 or 100Mbit). The Marvell 98DX3236 inside the Microtik CRS305 does not support USXGMII in this case, even if your SFP+ module did. Your tagged VLANs worked, because the switch is set to not modify tags by default, and it will just pass them. There's nothing concerning I see about the SMD caps you pointed at. I wasn't aware of this product, and I have a use for it especially given it's price point, so thanks for that. Cheers...

Thanks for the demo and info, have a great day

Love this video. Personally, I really love mikrotik products. I am not happy that the company keeps there software close source. However, nice product for low cost. I would love to see your review of an RB4011 using routerOS. Great video keep up the grind!

One thing I like about Winbox is the ability to hit things via mac. For instance if I plug into a switch via ethernet, with winbox I can hit the switch via MAC address without having to set an IP etc (assuming of course there is no VLAN settings, ACL etc preventing it)

Nice review, just bought one! Now I just have to replace all NICs on the computers :P

I love this unit. I also have mine in switchmode, and find it to be feature rich for my home network. I use it to connect my FreeNAS machine, my ESXi host, my wife's development server, and my personal workstation back to the rest of my home network. The PoE feature is great as my PoE-enabled "core" switch powers it on one UPS, and the external brick is on another. A third would be possible if I had a third rail and third 12V source. The network features are great on this little unit. the RTSP features make it great, and for SAN applications it supports 9000MTU. The dot1q trunking is super easy and I love that by default every port takes all VLANs, but if you want to isolate (ie: security zones, customers, etc) you can...Awesome little unit. I found that the unit was a bit weak on the SNMP front with just 64bit interface counters to grab - thermals, attenuation, etc were not. The stats and error counters are very helpful in the webui. The fact that it speaks CDP is a bonus too. Cheers.

I've used 2k hour caps in a 10k hour design. If you are cool and well under ripple current rating they will last significantly longer. Many reliable mfgs put life curves in datasheet and will send you a cap with embedded thermal couple.

IMHO the best thing about Mikrotik is the software. Tremendous capabilities and pretty stable. It's running on a customised Linux. You could run Winbox in Wine and believe me, it's worth the learning curve. The options and capabilities are amazing. A good teacher is Maher Haddad he's here in RU-vid and at Udemy.

Man I'm looking forward to your excellent tutorials on router os 😁👍 I'd love to watch mikrotik iot network isolation Finally someone who makes sense talking about mikrotik excellent and affordable products

One thing not mentioned: Mikrotik specifically says on their product page that if you use an RJ45 10Gig adapter, you might need extra (active) cooling. Though if you want to fill this one up with 10gig rj45 adapters, it's probably cheaper and less complicated to just buy an actual small 10gig rj45 switch.

Hi Tom, can you review the switching performance as a storage switch please?

Question - I have Fiber to the Home with a 1 Gig connection (option to go up to 10 gig if I have the $$$) Right now I am running a edge router lite, but would this give me better results? also I believe that I have the option to remove the "Gateway" and plug directly into the fiber. Would this be a better solution. Both me and the wife work from home plus we do a lot of streaming and watch a lot of plex with family outside my house.

Is there a video where you talk about your setup there? I am very interest on your trueNAS experience and how you built your data server there.

Every CRS has wireless menu, regardless on absence of radio hardware, and can be used for capsman so you can manage your cap wifi network on it. Also, since this switch is L5 licensed, it can even provide you hotspot for 500 users among some other stuff. L4 is 200, L6 is unlimited, cheapest L5 is CRS106 with msrp 49$ and cheapest L6 is RB1100AHx4 with msrp 299$. I doubt that anyone would use those features on CRS305 since it probably would not be the only RouterOS device in the network. But it's doable for extreme budgeting on 10G, especially if router/gw/fw is not RouterOS.

Hello, do you know how to do a link aggregation between routerOS and SwicthOS? Thank you

I have a Dell Powerconnect 8024F in my homelab, which is really overkill (I'm only using 5 ports). I'm looking at switching (haha, so punny) to a MikroTik CRS309-1G-8S+ (8 port 10gbe), and cut down on some of the power usage.

Give Winbox a try... its the same menu's of the web interface but you can have multiple areas opened in the same window and everything updates realtime...

Since this is a managed switch, does it support link aggregation for 20gb throughput?

I've got a CRS305 as well. Oddly enough, it seems to route my 10G through the CAT port? is that possible? I've struggled getting the Mikrotik getting an IP address from my LAN (which is 1000Mb), and plugging in my 10G network into this switch. My 10G network wouldn't get internet access. I had to tinker with VLANs and failed miserably. Not sure why I couldn't just plug and play this unit into my network without causing issues.

Triple redundant power sources then? PoE plus two DC inputs?

can't recommend powering it via POE for extended periods of time (I've had nothing but issues with it locking up and shorting the POE power to the case, that was painful) but when powered via the included wall wart it has been rock solid. great cheap entry to 10gig

Might be just what I need. Thanks.

Obviously this switch is running RouterOS which is a router firmware. Some device can run both RouterOS and SwitchOS depending on your needs. SwitchOS is probably a better choice if you only need switching because of it much simpler interface. Winbox and Web config share same functionality. Winbox is just quick and allow multiple modal window. You may also check the CLI. Just run « export » command to spit out config (similar to « show run » on cisco)

Wait a minute, in the first configuration page it showed options for Router or Bridge. Can this switch be a router as well??

Can you try to run Ubibiquiti unifi ac pro with miktoritic and use VLAN to separate IoT devices from a home network, it will be awesome!

Did you power that with 802.3at from your unify switch? I have a USW-Lite-8-PoE and wondered if I can power the Mikrotik from it?

Nice review. really good. I have a question not related to this topic. I've seen you use ubnt products, so I have a question about it. Do ubiquiti APs are kind of dumb? I mean if you set them up using a laptop that controller is installed on it, then you turn off the laptop. then who is in charge of roaming and this kind of stuff? Is answer The router? so then this APs are something like bridge between the router and clients? and they just provide layer 1 and 2 connectivity and have nothing to do with layer 3 and IP and DHCP things?? I have no access to this ubiquiti APs so I can't figure it out myself.

that 1G unifi transceiver was SFP to fiber rt? anyone knows if it works with a unifi 1G SFP - RJ45 one?

What is the top speed possible by a NIC connected to a PCIe generation 2.0 x4 slot, or a PCIe generation 2.0 x16 slot wired for x4? ? Can it use a 10gb NIC? Why or why not?

MikroTik make some cool stuff ! I wish they would do a 3x3 access point and get the 48 port switches out. Also going to trigger people now , but IMO CAPsMAN > Unifi controller .

`ip -c a` gives you a pretty colors on the terminal. `alias ip='ip -c' in bashrc is a nice addon to always show colored output

Hey man i have tasked with creating a new network for garden centre nursery and there current setup is terrible, my question is can i get unifi stuff with a uk plug

Thanks Tom! Excited to learn more about MikroTik’s offerings. I noticed they offer a 24 gigabit port + 2x 10Gbe SFP+ switch. It’s only $140 which is very competitive for a managed switch with 10Gbe support. Ordered one to try it out

Nice switch, I had one and did a giveaway as another sub donated a 10Gb Unifi.

seems like you got a bit of network knowledge. Are you familiar with Vyos (formerly Vyatta) and if so, could you share your comparisons w/ JunOS/IOS?

Este Mikro Tik Puede trabajar con multigigagit 5gbe (Gbps) y 2,4 gbe (Gbps)?

it is a very good switch but as a router it is very hard to setup, you need to relearn everything from ground up.

Can I use the one ethernet port for internet connectivity?

more mikroTik product please !!

same device start using local isp for providing new speed - 10Gbit/s :D

I can't seem to get the vlans to work nor find a good tutorial on how to setup vlans in SWOS anywhere from start to finish. I created the vlan (50) in pfsense, added it and enabled it's interface, disabled dhcp for it, and created the same vlan id (50) in 'VLANS' in SWOS with the trunk plus port 2 and 10 as checked. On the 'VLAN' page on the switch I set port 10's 'Default VLAN ID' to '50'. Because I can't have DHCP on for this new VLAN, I manually set my ubuntu server on port 10 to have a static IP address. I created allow rules from LAN to VLAN50 in both the LAN and VLAN50 networks in Pfsense, but I cannot ping or ssh from my LAN machine to the ubuntu server on port 10 (vlan 50) nor the other way around. I read the mikrotik documentation on vlans, but didn't help at all. I have no idea when to set 'default/enabled/optional' for vlan mode or when to force VLan ID, etc. Any help is super appreciated.

It looks like it's a L3 switch when running RouterOS (makes sense). Seems to be a great value.

please please please, i dont understand completly, this device is like an OLT, but works like: INTERNET (RJ45) - >MIKROTIC -> FIBER (4SFP ports) -> ONU/ONT (CLIENTS) ??

I'm sorry, I'm new to networking, if the Ethernet is only 1 Gigabit and you use it for the "WAN", the SFP+ bottlenecked to only 1 Gigabit and not 10G, no? I'm sorry for my English too if it's messy 😅

What is Switch mode called is it Bridged? very confusing for a newbie.

Would it work as a 10G router running RouteOS - that would make is a very cheap 10G router

I have one, it's good. But i have a little problem and i don't know why this happend: I have an FSP+ 10G to RJ45 plugged to it (Mikrotik S+RJ10) and about 15 meters of CAT6a S/FTP for which i redo an end with a shielded RJ45 connector and it doesn't syncronise in 10G (windows says 5Gbps but i have less than 1Gbps when doing a speedtest). Hope someone who reads commenst will have a solution. :)

love your leet vlan!

I would really like a 10G switch as right now I am bridging a couple 10Gb cards to get by. The MikroTik would be nice if it were offered in RJ-45 since that's what I use. I know the adapters were mentioned but I would need to either buy 4 (expensive) or buy 2 along with 2 DAC cables and SFP+ cards (probably almost as expensive), just unfortunately doesn't make sense for my use case...

Does it support PoE out to power a deskphone or something? Assuming you have it powered via external power, obviously?

I'm very curious about its heat issues especially when all ports are filled with copper SFP converters. I might consider modding a noctua fan and some heat sinks to it.

POE stops after first power on. Any one see a fix for this?

How distance it work sir

It have dual boot, you can boot on switch Mode

Ok this is what sucks. I want to use the switch OS since I want to use this just as a switch. When I change it to switch OS I no longer can get in to it at all. I even used the 88.1 and 88.2 others have tried. even tried the windbox can't get on it at all. any ideas.

讲的非常棒，感谢您的分享~谢谢~

Is the RJ-45 MNGT port only for management traffic or can I use the port as a link to another Gbit switch in my network?

Can this switch mirror the traffic for the fiber ports to the Ethernet one?

Would you recommend using MikroTik to a novice networker/home user? I've read that just using the Quick Setup will set up a MirkoTik router well enough to run in a home situation with a few phones connected via WiFi and few wired systems. Or is spending $65-70 on MikroTik equipment only gonna give headaches due to it being more of an enterprise product and thus interfaces aren't easiest to understand for a novice?

Hello and many thanks for your great videos! I have a question about configuring the device as a switch. I want to connect this switch to another 1G switch in my LAN first. Then I want to connect two computers each with a 10Gb card to two of the sfp+ ports. So far I have connected the switch (with SWOS) and can reach it from the LAN. But when I connect a PC via sfp port to the new switch, the new switch shows me this computer as connected, but I cannot reach it from my LAN (the IP's are all from the same area). Why can I ping the new switch but not the connected computer? Thanks!

People talk about Mikrotik because the routerboardOS software is insanely good. This isn't for the layman. If you use winbox, you can get to it via the mac address.

How much learning curve could there be on a switch? Maybe I should watch the rest of the video. 😂

thank you for the video. can it be used as a router too?

Actual Mikrotik expert here. You forgot a few significant issues with this switch. You can only use (2) 10G-base-T SFP modules because the power budget for SFP modules is only 8 watts. Also, the 10G modules get super hot and mikrotik says that you need to use caution when using them on passive devices. Those reasons more or less make this switch useless for anything running over RJ-45 copper. It's only useful in a fiber or DAC environment. As for switchOS or routerOS, the advantage of having the complete routerOS is that this can be a gateway or DHCP server, or firewall, or whatever. That's nice because sometimes you might want 10G in a small 4 port environment connected to the internet or some other network over 1G. The little CPU in this is plenty enough to be a gateway to another network over 1G as long as you don't have a huge amount of firewall rules. Lastly, the CLI is nice. It makes it easy to copy the entire config to a text file, modify, backup, restore, version control, etc.

Any issues using different transceivers? Cisco, Mellanox, Gtek?

I already have two devices with 2.5GBase-T. Is it possible to use this switch with RJ45 copper SFP+-Modules at 2.5G speed (mixed with 10G DAC)?

What desktop PCIe NIC would work best with the MikroTik switch, using DAC?

Awesome ... hardware .. ... willing switch to it from generic 2k's cpu ... :((

Redundant power? Nice.....

How did you get that elgato stream deck to work with your linux laptop?

winbox good tools to contrall mikrotik

Seriously, I'm age 54, been in IT for about 38 years or so, and I have yet to meet the network switch that dies on me because of 'bad capacitors'. Those that are in them are barely in use on switches. If you know your electronics and physics, you'll know this is not an issue.

im almost certain this was designed for the geek at home to get 10gig in their network and to learn microtiks OS so that same geek can recommend them in their work environment

Why SFP ? Is there similar RJ45 model?

Is there a 10G one with 4x RJ45 ports with the same price?

Can I use the Ethernet port as link to the Internet

5:45 ..... That has been said. :)

can port 1 (RJ45) be used as a downlink or uplink only?

Does it Work With cisco sfp+ ?

I use winbox to find mikrotiks device. It have discovery protocol.

I can't log into this device to save my life. I've attached it to my computer via both Ethernet and SFP+ and every time I try to log onto the switch's IP (192.168.88.1) it just bounces back saying it can't connect. Currently, the SFP+ ports work, but only at 1G speeds, can't figure out what's going on. Any insight on this device would be helpful if you've seen this issue before. Thanks for your video! (Wish ours connected as easily, ha!)

what about home 10g ? internet companies have 10G ?