What is the difference between an unmanaged switch and managed switch?
A managed switch lets you take control of your network and all the traffic moving through it, while an unmanaged switch simply allows Ethernet devices to communicate with one another. Unmanaged switches use a protocol called “auto-negotiation” to agree upon certain communication parameters. One parameter they negotiate is the data rate — generally 10 or 100 Mbps. Another is whether to use half-duplex or full-duplex mode. A managed switch, on the other hand, does all of this while also providing the flexibility of being able to adjust the communication parameters of each port on the switch to any setting you desire. This gives you the option of monitoring and configuring your network in a variety of different ways and also provides you with greater control over how data travels over the network and who has access to it. Through the use of SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) you can view a multitude of network statistics. This includes the number of bytes and/or frames transmitted
