An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal.
Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2).
Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).
I had a nasty virus in my network and had to get a managed switch to port mirror into an ids. Sadly my IDs was so badly configured I never found it that way. Random repeated virus scans on all the windows gear in the house finally found it
My favorite feature is being able to selectively reboot the POE ports for my security cameras. I have Blue Iris tell Home assistant that a camera is offline and then with the home assistant integration for Netgear it sends the reboot POE command.
Some reolink cameras get in a weird mode where rtsp is broken but direction connecting to the cam stays working. I could issue the reboot command directly from the reolink integration but I find a full power reboot keeps them running longer than just a reboot.
An unmanaged switch is just a single plane where all ports are equal.
Managed switches (also sometimes known as “smart” switches) provide additional features on top of that. The most useful is VLANs (virtual LANs) which let you segregate traffic. Two ports on different VLANs share the same physical layer (layer 1) but are separated at the data link layer (layer 2).
Additionally, managed switches let you do things like disable/enable ports (for security, power savings, etc), enable port mirroring, and combine multiple ports into an aggregation group (e.g. bond four 1 Gb links into one 4 Gb link).
I had a nasty virus in my network and had to get a managed switch to port mirror into an ids. Sadly my IDs was so badly configured I never found it that way. Random repeated virus scans on all the windows gear in the house finally found it
My favorite feature is being able to selectively reboot the POE ports for my security cameras. I have Blue Iris tell Home assistant that a camera is offline and then with the home assistant integration for Netgear it sends the reboot POE command.
Some reolink cameras get in a weird mode where rtsp is broken but direction connecting to the cam stays working. I could issue the reboot command directly from the reolink integration but I find a full power reboot keeps them running longer than just a reboot.