Homelabbing isn't about WHY. It's about WHY NOT. Why is so much of our homelabbing is overkill? Why not marry safe labbing if you love it so much. In fact, why not invent a special safety door that won't hit you on the butt on the way out, because you are fired.
I feel like I have a pretty comprehensive setup but I have 10 ports hooked up of my 12 port switch, 1 for every major room in the house(5), 2 for my office and 2 for the servers and one for input. And honestly I only use 2 room ones so I have 3 that go unused.
I can't imagine the level of insanity that would require 48 ports for home use.
Those 3750Gs are beasts though! Fully L3 capable, and every feature you could possibly want in a switch from 2008. For my final project in college I actually used one of those as my core switch and pushed it to the max using it for redundancy, routing, etc. and it just shrugged as I was simply using it for what it was built for
Well... I have a few servers, that all have 2 port minimum (they actually all have 5 ethernets) (IPMI and Normal Ethernet) that's already 10 port, plus my Desktop, plus the link nto the router, plus storage management of a JBOD (2 ports) that's already 14 ports, and then I want to do stuff with POE Rasberry Pis (or similar) and I also have a few AP that I can now try and have fun with! I won't use the 48 ports, but 24 ports were more expensives where I live... so, I took this one!
If you find a $100 used server, that server will probably have 2-10 NICs on it. And any time you run a network cable, you should run 2 instead. And nobody wants to connect to a dead port. It all compounds. In a house 48 ports is kinda hard to use, but in a business with 10 people it is easy to fill a 48 port. It's crazy how network cables multiply like rabbits.
Yes!! I have many switches! I see this is a Cisco, so you will learn how to run a managed network using Cisco CL. Making that work with the TPLink will be fun and educational. Pretty nice!
It is pretty quiet yeah, but not fanless I might try to mod it with some small noctua fans, won't be optimal but it won't run at 100% all the time, I'll put the noisy blower back if one day I buy a enclosed rack