Netgear’s Nighthawk series of networking equipment holds high esteem in the prosumers community. At CES 2017, Netgear continues to elaborate on its Nighthawk family with the release of the Nighthawk S8000 gaming and media switch.
The Nighthawk S8000 aims to simplify and optimize intense home multimedia needs. Each of its 8 Gigabit Ethernet ports can be configured individually to ensure optimized performance to the connected device. The Nighthawk S8000 also features port trunking, which allows up to 4 ports to be aggregated together for a maximum of 4Gbps transfer speed on a single connection. The link can either be used to boost throughput beyond what’s possible on a single port or be used as redundant connections in case one fails.
Being a layer 2 networking device, the S8000 offloads some of the heavier tasks from the router. Netgear Web Managed (Plus) Switch software provides functions such as port-based Quality of Service (QoS), protection against denial of service attacks (DoS), and 4 levels of traffic prioritization.
The Netgear S8000 will be released world-wide in March 2017 at a MSRP of $99.99.
