Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by the same person. This one names him, describes how a judgment gets made, and — just as usefully — lists what he is not.

What set this off

It began with the hollowest number anywhere on this shelf: a class figure printed as though it were a speed. The digits after AX or BE are an arithmetic sum — take the theoretical peak rate the standard defines for each radio in the box, from its channel width and its stream count, and add them together. No client is connected to every radio at once, so nothing on any network reaches the total, and adding the bands up is precisely what makes it large. Once you notice it, the pattern is everywhere. A switching capacity that assumes every socket saturated in both directions simultaneously. A powerline kit quoted at a figure belonging to the standard rather than to the building. A coverage area resting on one maker's private assumptions about walls. A peak sequential figure taken at a queue depth ordinary use never produces. Nearly every page you find while looking for an answer has the same shape: a ranked list, an affiliate button, and not one figure you can check against a specification sheet.

There is a second problem, and it is worse because it is settled before the box is even opened. This hardware is bought on photographs and returned on compatibility. An M.2 drive too long for the standoff positions a laptop offers. A card in a connector that is physically ×16 and wired for four lanes, which nothing about its appearance reveals. An access point specified for 802.3at fed from an injector that only offers 802.3af. A shielded plug crimped onto unshielded cable, where the screen has nowhere to go. A transceiver that is electrically correct and refused by a switch reading a vendor code it does not recognise. A cabinet whose external dimension flattered a depth that will not close on a switch with a rear power inlet. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing works at all.

So this is the page that was missing. This site reads what manufacturers publish, confirms every product reference market by market, writes down the line that decides — which PoE class is asked for, which lengths a slot supports, which conductor a plug grips, which convention a capacity is quoted in, which figure is a rating and which is a statistic — and says plainly when something is not published at all. That last part carries more weight than it sounds: most of the disappointment in this subject comes from a number nobody printed, or from one printed without the condition that makes it mean something.

Behind the site are notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which category of cable a run actually calls for, what a maker means by a workload rating in terabytes per year, and the buying mistake each family invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a network engineer, an installer or a storage architect, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its unit and its source, and tell you which figure the maker left out.

Everything written up so far

What follows is built straight from the catalog, one entry at a time, each linking to the page that covers it; add a family or retire a product and this list moves with it, untouched by hand. It is a record of what is written about here — not an inventory of hardware in a cupboard of mine.

What I care about

There are three, and each one shows up on every page here. What gets printed largest is seldom what settles the purchase — a router sold on a class figure rather than on the four gigabit sockets that cap everything behind it, a PoE switch sold on its per-port budget rather than on the total the powered sockets share, a solid-state drive sold on a sequential peak rather than on the size of the buffer that peak lasts for, a NAS sold on its bay count rather than on the processor and memory that decide what it can serve. Years of ownership settle the choice more often than the shelf price does — a UPS is a machine that will need a battery pack matched on a cell reference, a keystone panel is bought once and populated three times, a fan bearing ages in a room somebody works in, and soldered memory decides what a NAS will still be doing in five years. And the deciding property is generally absent from the specification sheet altogether: whether the thing can be opened, powered and mounted where it has to live, because an enclosure that cooks its own drive, a cabinet too shallow to close, and a transceiver a switch will not accept all end up in a drawer long before they wear out.

What I am not

I am not a network engineer, an installer, a storage architect or a systems administrator. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its dimensions, its stated figures, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every class figure, port speed, PoE class, power budget, PCIe generation and lane count, form factor code, capacity, sequential and random figure, TBW rating, MTBF statistic, VA and watt rating and stated load on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its unit written as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a workload rating or a runtime at a given load, I report that the maker states it, with the condition it names beside it, and no product here is described as faster, cooler or longer-lived than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And this site is emphatically not an installation manual. For anything that carries mains power, holds a sealed lead-acid battery, or has to be earthed to do its job, it points at the maker's instructions and at the wiring rules of the country you are in rather than paraphrasing them. It repeats two statements rather than assuming them. A RAID level is a way of carrying on through a drive failure and nothing more: it does not survive a deletion, a hostile encryption, a theft or a fire, a rebuild is when a second drive is most likely to fail, and a copy kept on separate hardware somewhere else is a different arrangement which no redundancy level replaces. And TBW, MTBF and a warranty term are three separate published quantities, and none of them is a lifespan: a rated quantity of writing, a population statistic in hours, and a commercial term that normally ends at whichever limit arrives first. If a page here touches a rule, it describes it and points to the authority or the manual that publishes it, and goes no further.

No page here asks to be trusted on account of the name above it. What a judgment stands on is written into the page making the judgment, and the fuller account of the way a verdict is assembled has a page of its own.

How I work

Each figure arrives with its origin attached: a datasheet, a manual, a published rating, a named standard, or the Amazon.com listing the product is sold under.
Not one price, reference or specification is ever invented. Where a maker publishes nothing, the field stays blank and the page states that the figure is unpublished.
Every review gives the Amazon.com offer read on a named date. Where Amazon.com had none, the page says so in the review itself and points to models on the same shelf that it did sell.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is moving, rewiring or reconfiguring what you already own rather than buying something, it says that instead.
No page here is written to sell a headline figure. Nothing is arranged around the biggest number printed on a box — the highest class figure, the largest joule rating — and where one generation barely differs from the last, the page says as much.

What made it worth writing

Because this hardware is sold on photographs and on the wrong numbers, to people whose files and whose working day depend on the result. A class figure is printed where a band plan and a port speed belong. A per-port budget is printed where the total budget belongs. A peak sequential rate is printed where a sustained one belongs. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the injector sold separately, the lead in the box that expects a socket your machine does not have, the thermal pad, the cage nuts, the load bar in the packet of plugs — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing is any use at all.

Some of this has no purchase attached to it whatever. If a single line here carries more than the others, it is that a published figure describes something; it promises nothing. Reversing that sells more hardware and leaves a reader let down by a purchase that behaved exactly as its specification said it would. A good deal of what improves a network is free: running a mesh node off an Ethernet outlet it is already standing beside, plugging a powerline pair straight into wall sockets on one circuit instead of into a filtered strip, siting a repeater where the signal is still healthy rather than where it is worst, fitting the pad that came in the enclosure box, and labeling both ends of a run while the ladder is still up. Those things are free and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new hardware is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

Spot something wrong on these pages and say so: it will be put right, and the correction dated on the page it belongs to. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · NetVerdict · Paris, France