Home-lab networking gear splits neatly into two camps. There is the name-brand stuff from Netgear, TP-Link, MikroTik, and Ubiquiti that costs real money and comes with a warranty and a support line. And there is the vast ocean of oddly-named Amazon switches with brands like YuanLey, XikeStor, and Sodola that cost half as much and make everyone in r/homelab nervous. I bought the YuanLey 8 Port 2.5G switch to find out which camp it really belongs to.
Short version: it has been running my secondary rack for months without a hiccup, and I would buy another tomorrow. It gives you eight full 2.5GbE ports plus a genuine 10G SFP+ uplink, it is completely fanless and silent, and it costs less than a single decent managed switch from a name brand. The catch is that it is unmanaged, so if you need VLANs this is not your switch. For everything else, it is one of the best value pieces of gear in my lab.
Here is how it actually performed once it was doing real work.
What You Get for the Money
The value proposition is what pulls you in. Eight 2.5GbE copper ports means eight devices that can each talk at two and a half gigabit: a NAS, a couple of Proxmox mini PCs, a desktop, a WiFi 6 access point, and still have room. The ports auto-negotiate down to gigabit and 100 megabit, so older gear just works alongside the fast stuff.
The part that actually matters, and the reason I picked this model over the identical-looking unmanaged competitors, is the 10G SFP+ cage. That single port turns this from a dead-end desktop switch into a proper satellite node on a real backbone. I run a 10G SFP+ core switch in the main rack, drop a DAC cable from it to this YuanLey in the other room, and now every 2.5G device hanging off it shares a fat 10-gigabit trunk back to the core. No 2.5G uplink bottleneck where eight devices fight over one 2.5G link. That is the design detail that separates a good cheap switch from a merely cheap one.
For the uplink you have two options. A 10G SFP+ DAC cable is the cheapest and most reliable choice for a short run between two switches in adjacent rooms, and it runs cooler than optics. If your uplink switch only has copper, a 10GBASE-T SFP+ module lets you use an ordinary Ethernet run, though those modules run warm and cost more. I used a three-meter DAC and it just linked up at 10G with no configuration, because there is no configuration to do.
Real-World Throughput
Specs are one thing; what actually moves across the wire is another. I tested it the way a home lab actually uses a switch, with real file transfers rather than synthetic loopback numbers. Pulling a large disk image from my NAS to a Proxmox mini PC, both on 2.5G ports on this switch, I saw sustained transfers hold right around 280 megabytes a second, which is essentially wire speed for 2.5GbE once you account for protocol overhead. That is more than double what the old gigabit switch managed, and on a multi-gigabyte transfer the difference is the gap between watching a progress bar and not.
The more interesting test was through the uplink. With the NAS on this switch and my desktop back on the core switch in the rack, traffic had to cross the 10G SFP+ DAC trunk. It saturated the 2.5G endpoints without breaking a sweat, because the trunk has four times the headroom of any single device on either end. Run two simultaneous 2.5G transfers across that uplink and they both stay near full speed, which is exactly the scenario where a switch with only a 2.5G uplink would fall on its face. This is the practical payoff of paying attention to that SFP+ port instead of grabbing the cheapest eight-port 2.5G box.
I also left it running a WiFi 6 access point, a couple of virtualization hosts, and a NAS all at once for weeks. Aggregate load never made it stumble. For a flat home network moving real data, it behaves exactly like a switch three times the price, minus the management features.
Silent and Cool, Which Matters More Than You Think
This switch is fanless, and in a home lab that is a real feature, not a footnote. My core switch and NVR live in a closet where fan noise does not matter. This one sits on a shelf in a room people actually use, and it makes exactly zero sound. A lot of cheap multi-gig switches, especially the PoE ones, ship with a tiny screaming fan that you will hear across the room. This one is a passive metal box that stays merely warm to the touch even with every port lit.
Power draw is trivial too. Without PoE in the equation, the whole switch pulls a handful of watts, which matters when it is on twenty-four hours a day next to a UPS with a finite runtime budget. Over months of continuous uptime it has never gotten hot, never dropped a link, and never needed a reboot. For a sub-hundred-dollar off-brand switch, that boring reliability is the whole review.
The Big Caveat: It Is Unmanaged
Here is where you have to be honest with yourself about what you need. This switch is unmanaged. There is no web interface, no VLAN support, no link aggregation, no per-port statistics, no SNMP, nothing. You plug things in and they talk. That is the entire feature set.
For a huge number of home labs, that is completely fine, and pretending otherwise is how people overspend. If your network is flat, meaning everything sits on one subnet and you are not segmenting IoT gear or cameras or guests onto separate VLANs, an unmanaged switch does exactly what a managed one would, for less money and with nothing to configure or misconfigure. My secondary rack does not need VLANs because the segmentation happens upstream at the core router and main managed switch. This YuanLey is a dumb, fast, silent aggregation point behind that boundary, and dumb is precisely the right tool for that job.
But if you specifically want to isolate your smart-home and camera traffic onto their own VLAN, tag ports, or bond two links together, this switch cannot do any of it and you will be annoyed within a week. In that case, spend more on a managed 2.5G switch and get the web UI. Do not buy this one and hope a firmware update adds VLANs, because it will not. Match the switch to your actual topology. For a lot of us, the topology is flat behind a smart core, and this is the correct, cheap answer.
Off-Brand Risk, Honestly Assessed
The elephant in the room with any YuanLey-class switch is support and longevity. These are not companies with a US support desk and a five-year advance-replacement warranty. If this switch dies in year three, I will probably just buy another rather than fight for an RMA. That is the real trade you are making for the low price.
I make my peace with it two ways. First, the price is low enough that treating it as semi-disposable is rational: two of these still cost less than one name-brand managed switch. Second, a switch is a simple device with no moving parts once you remove the fan, and passive fanless units like this have very little to fail. The failure mode I would actually worry about, a dying fan cooking the board, does not apply here. For a non-critical satellite node, I am comfortable with the risk. For the single core switch that the entire house depends on, I would still spend up for a known brand.
The Bottom Line
The YuanLey 8 Port 2.5G switch is a genuinely good buy for the specific job it is built for: cheap, silent, reliable multi-gig aggregation with a real 10G SFP+ uplink back to a proper backbone. It anchored the second half of my home lab for months without a single issue, it makes no noise, it runs cool, and it costs a fraction of a name-brand managed switch. The two honest caveats are that it is unmanaged, so VLAN people should look elsewhere, and that off-brand support is a gamble you accept for the price. If your network is flat behind a smart core and you just want more fast ports with a 10G trunk, this is the switch I keep buying, and you can grab it on Amazon for the price of a nice dinner.