S3900-48T4S 48-Port 10/100/1000Base-T Gigabit Stackable Managed Switch with 10GB SFP+ Uplinks

Well what to say about this, well as you would know FS.COM is probably famous for their super cheap GBics and Fibre Optic Cables and the like, to be honest I was skeptical. I’ll elaborate on this more in a little while
I have been working in a High School for 20 years and we have always been a Hewlett Packard HP or CISCO school. When I first started in 1999 we had a bit 80 port switch and not knowing any better we stuck with this brand.
Being in a small school, we do not have the budgets of other big schools and so bang for our buck Value for Money is extremely important to us. Recently we were approved to upgrade our aging infrastructure and move to 10 gigabit networking. We had to of course get our 3 quotes so we approached our Hewlett Packard supplier and also just to see if we were in the mix the department of education’s CISCO supplier. We got two quotations back to do 7 switches and a fibre optic back bone one at about $35,000.00 AUD and another at about $37,000.00 AUD. When I spoke to our principal he almost fell off his chair and said that there would be no way we would be able to approve that amount of money you will have to stick with the networking gear you have and we will just have to put up with it.
We hit the Department of Education’s forums and I was pointed at FS.COM. We had a look at their gear and on paper it beat Hewlett Packard in speed, throughput and it was about 35 of the cost. We thought to ourselves this is too good to be true.
So we decided after a lot of talking with Ellen Wang and Gladys Yang who have been extremely helpful in this whole process and answered all of my questions as dumb as some of them may have been. That we would obtain a sample.
We were provided with S3900-48T4S 48-Port 10/100/1000Base-T Gigabit Stackable Managed Switch with 10GB SFP+ Uplinks and I tell you it is just a sensational little unit for what it is. We also purchased some 10 Gig Gbics and some direct attach cables and plugged them in.
We transferred over 300 Gigabytes in about 7 minutes and 30 seconds. These were very large Virtual Machines and we got according to Windows Explorer through a file transfer we were able to get anywhere between 380 MB per second to 430 MB per second steady.
We also transferred performed the same test with our newly acquired CISCO switch that was supplied by the department for our wireless controller.
We also transferred the same 300 Gigabytes in about 9 minutes. The main thing we noticed with this switch is that after a file transferred successfully the throughput dropped to 0 MB per second for a number of seconds. This switch was slightly faster however at about 420 MB per second up to about 470 MB per second but because it stopped after each file transfer it took longer to get back up to speed where as the S3900-48T4S 48-Port 10/100/1000Base-T Gigabit Stackable Managed Switch with 10GB SFP+ Uplinks was stable at its 380 MB per second – 430 MB per second and was able to get the job done easily.
We were able to do this test several times and it performed exactly the same over at least 3 repetitions of this test. When we logged the switch to watch its performance we did not see the processor go above 50 of its switching capability. The configuration is very simple to understand and everything is reachable a couple of clicks.
If there is something that you can’t understand then the Technical Support is also fantastic. We are planning to do the rest of our infrastructure upgrade with FS.COM because not only are we extremely happy and excited to be working with FS.COM.
The products they sell do what they say they will and meet our criteria and our cost envelope. We are very happy and would highly recommend FS.COM to anyone who is looking to really get great value for money, extremely friendly service and a product that can be depended on.

A recent anomaly by the power company in our neighborhood destroyed many appliances including a switch in my office. I had been using two switch to have enough ports and reduced this count to one with the S3900. I mounted the switch on the side of a bookcase in my office and have yet to sort out cable management. I used the console port on the switch and for me COM1-115200-8-1 with putty to set an IP on the "craft" port. I was then able to use the MGT (Out of Band Management) port to setup the switch. I needed some learning to find the location of some settings as expected with different firmware. The CLI and WEB documents are accurate and helpful.

Pretty good gigabit switch, both for its price and quality point. We have worked with them for nearly half a year but never had any issues. The after-sales service is good, my sales rep keeps a connection with me and asks about my experience.
Actually, I felt it inconvenient when configuring the switch for the first time, for we have been used to the configuration commands of Cisco. FS switch commands are like Cisco but there is something slightly different. I could not get used to this so fast. For example, I used to save config using the write command on Cisco but now copy config start config on it. Anyway, fortunately it works well.
What surprises me most is the user-friendly management, which other switches we used before lack. The config will not override the settings before but save a new file, so I can easily retrieve config in case there is something wrong.

Last month, I was trapped in figuring what switch to choose for my home network. The thing is that I have an empty 15U rack and I need to purchase a 10G switch to support three of my 10G devices and a Gigabit switch with at least 24 ports for other devices.
I was thinking of buying a 24-port or 48-port gigabit switch and a 10G switch. A friend reminded me that maybe a 24/48-port gigabit switch with 10G uplinks ports is the best choice for the sake of price. Then, I searched on the Internet and found two similar ones: Cisco WS-C2960L-48TQ-LL and FS S3900-48T4S. They have many similar features. I chose the latter mostly because of the BCM56150 chip and partially with its relatively favorable price. BTW, it works well. Hope it will be a reference for your purchase in some way.

Our new office needs to replace the aging network equipment, and there are more than 150 devices in one building. I buy four S3900-48T4S, one PoE switch and some cat6 cables for the office network rebuild. This is not my first experience with FS, but there are some details I want to share.

Port/Package—These switches and cables arrived on time, not much to say. Each switch is wrapped with white foam board, one product instruction manual, and a box of accessories (four cables, two rack-mount brackets, some screws, and little rubber?). Thanks to that FS has prepared the rack mount ears, I can install the switches easily without buying it separately. That's nice. The FS 48-port Gigabit switch is great for those situations where you have a number of devices to connect because it provides 48 GB ports and 4 SFP+ ports. That’s what we need for our new offices where there are more than 150 devices need to be linked.

Set Up/Performance—When I plugged the power cables, the fan on the S3900-48T4S switch generated a little bit of sound, but about one or two minutes later, the sound would get down and be acceptable, especially in our group of noisy working switches.

Since there were lots of devices to be connected, the first thing I did was to set the stack function. I connected two S3900-48T4S switches together as their instructions, and found the stack command, input them and reset the switches, nothing went wrong, they began to work in a stack. Then I created two VLANs for the working and control computers to limit the access permission for different parts, which I thought is a necessary part for the whole network security and management.

Management—Like most switches I used before, the S3900-48T4S supports standard CLI and web management as well. The web management includes a number of functions, the VLAN configuration mentioned above are finished through the web. The most important point for me is that this gigabit switch is simple and budget-friendly. And compared with the same level switch of Meraki, Netgear, and Dell, this 48-port gigabit switch is a pretty choice for our new office network.

Of course, there are still some points these guys can improve:
The operation command of the switch is similar to Cisco, but the operating instructions do not provide step by step details. Maybe it's ok for most guys, but not friendly enough for newbie engineers like me. If you guys have problems and don’t want to check their PDF files, their remote help is available.

Conclusion
All the four 48T4S switches are working flawlessly in our new office host room, and so far I haven't experienced a single hitch. Take the whole experience and customer service into consideration, I think this product is worth a try.

I have long enjoyed FS products but this was my first FS switch. I actually don't utilize this product to its fullest extent yet but so far it has worked flawlessly.

Love this switch. Runs all the things I need and even the ones I plan to get. I built an entire internet system using mostly FS equipment - 10G switch, S3900-48T4S switch, 260W 8-port POE switch, some SFP+ modules, and 3 access points. I received excellent support from FS team. Awesome!

This switch is easy to setup and very robust for our network. VLANS are pretty simple and very effective.

It replaced the previous one very well, fast, without configuration difficulties.

The switch, as well as its packaging and the entire contents look very noble.