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I have four of these in use and a 5th on the way. Without the additional module the 2424m is an amazing switch by itself. I am slowly wiring every room in the house with these and putting a J4113a SX gigabit fiber module in the expansion slot to uplink to a set of Procurve 4000M switches at my network core. My three sons each have 24 ports for XBox 360, Tivo, computer, thin client and whatever they want when their friends come over. If you look hard enough you can find the 2424m switches for less than $30 delivered. I even have one in the media room connected to one Tivo, internet wifi router and internet telephone adapter. With this configuration I can host movies on the server, fed to the Tivo while home phone calls are being made, one son seeds torrents, another plays XBox live, another does research for homework, I am working from my home office through a VPN, my wife is surfing facebook and two cell phones are downloading podcasts. The expansion modules are fully compatible with the 4000M modular switch. All you need is multimode fiber with SC connectors. Again, look hard enough and you can find it. I purchased 7x 30 meter cables for just under $30 delivered. With the fiber, there is no problem with interference and they are rock solid. Every room in the house will have gigabit uplink to the 4000M switches at the core of the network and HP allows trunking so my Solaris server feeds two trunked gigabit ethernet ports as a single entity. These Procurve switches have meshing capability which means that multiple switches can behave as a logical switch with redundant links. Further, even without meshing, I can point my web browser to the main 4000M switch and see the status of all switches currently connected. The real advantages to the 2424m, other than rock solid stability (look up Procurve's legendary reliability) are: 1. Expansion module is fully interchangeable with 4000M modules. Buy a module for the 4000M and use it in the back of the 2424m, and the other way around. You buy the modules you need and use them on any of the switches. 2. No BS lifetime warranty. I have purchased 10 year old switches with bad fans and bad modules. One email to HP and a replacement parts are sent the next day, no charge, no games. If anything goes wrong, I know HP will replace it, even though these were made 10 years ago and I am probably the 5th owner. 3. Centralized management. I can set up QoS and VLAN rules which are honored throughout the entire stack. Actually, the list could go on and on. I have about 8 total switches from HP with high-end capability for less than $350 in total cost over the past year. Buy a 2424m even if you don't need the uplink capability and add that later. You can't go wrong with these. The only thing these lack which a modern switch has is auto MDX, which means that you cannot use a standard ethernet cable between switches for the 10/100 ports, but you can for gigabit ports. Since I use fiber for switch to switch connections, this is not a problem.Read full review
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