CRS326-24G-2S+RM

At a Glance

Best For

Overview

The MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+RM is the cheapest legitimate path to a 10GbE backbone in a home lab. $219 buys you 24 gigabit copper ports, two SFP+ uplink cages running at line-rate 10G, a 1U rack chassis, and the choice to run it as a dumb switch (SwOS) or as a full RouterOS device with VLANs, OSPF, scripting, and bandwidth shaping. Nothing else in the under-$250 segment touches that on a per-port basis.

For a Proxmox cluster talking to a Synology DS923+, the two SFP+ ports turn into the backbone — drop a 10G SFP+ NIC in the NAS, run a DAC cable to the switch, and your Proxmox VMs can saturate the NAS at 5-8Gbps real-world. The remaining 24 gigabit ports become access ports for Pi-hole, IoT VLANs, IP cameras, your desktop, and whatever Beelink mini-PC arrived this week.

The trade-off is the learning curve. RouterOS is not a beginner UI. The Winbox tool looks like it shipped in 2003 (because it did, structurally), and the configuration model expects you to understand what you're doing. The CRS326 ships with SwOS as an alternative — a stripped-down GUI that does VLANs, QoS, and basic switching without the routing complexity. Most people start there and graduate to RouterOS once they need more than VLANs.

The one-line summary: if your home lab is moving past 'a couple of devices on a flat network' and you want 10GbE in the rack without spending $600, this is the switch you buy.

Pros & Cons

Why $9/Port + 10G SFP+ Is the Killer Spec for a Home Lab Rack

The CRS326's specs read like a typo. 24 gigabit ports + 2x 10G SFP+ uplinks at $219 works out to about $9 per gigabit port plus 'free' 10G uplinks once you amortize. The closest competitor at this price point is the TP-Link TL-SG3428X ($379), which has the same port count but switches at lower throughput, and then you're talking $15+/port at the UniFi USW-Pro-24-PoE ($699).

Where that pricing matters is the 10G uplink. A home lab without 10G is fine until you want fast NAS access during a backup, fast Proxmox live migration between nodes, or 4K Plex streams to multiple clients while a TimeMachine backup runs. With dual SFP+, you can: (1) trunk a 10G DAC from the switch to your NAS's optional 10GbE PCIe card, (2) trunk another 10G DAC to your second-floor switch as a backbone, or (3) bond both SFP+ for LACP if you have a 20G-capable upstream router (rare in home labs, but the option's there).

At the home-lab tier, this is the difference between Proxmox VMs that stream from a NAS at 100MB/s (gigabit) vs 600+MB/s (10G). Plex transcoded streams are tiny; raw NFS reads to a Proxmox VM are not. Once you have 10G in the backbone, the bottleneck moves to the NAS's drives, which is exactly where you want it.

For reference, what 10G actually costs once you commit: $219 switch + $25 SFP+ DAC + $200 for a Synology 10GbE PCIe card = $444 total to put a 10G backbone between your switch and your NAS. There is no cheaper credible path.

SwOS vs RouterOS — Which Firmware to Run on Day One

The CRS326 ships with the ability to boot either SwOS or RouterOS. You hold a button on first boot to pick. Most people get this wrong and immediately boot into RouterOS because it looks more 'pro' on the spec sheet, and then they spend three weeks fighting an unfamiliar UI to do what SwOS does in a checkbox.

Use SwOS if your switch needs are: VLANs (802.1Q with port-based tagging/untagging), QoS, IGMP snooping, basic STP/RSTP, port mirroring, and link aggregation. That's 95% of home-lab use cases. SwOS gives you a clean tabbed web UI where each tab maps to a switch feature, you configure ports in a grid, and you save the config. There is no CLI to memorize. You will not be tempted to learn RouterOS scripting at 2am. Boot SwOS, configure your VLANs, walk away.

Use RouterOS if your switch needs include any of: dynamic routing (OSPF, BGP), bandwidth shaping (queues), VPN termination at the switch (don't do this — get a router), firewall rules at the switch level, scripting/automation via the API, MPLS, or any layer-3 functionality. RouterOS is genuinely powerful — it'll do things a Cisco Catalyst 3650 does — but the cost is a real learning investment. Plan to spend a weekend with the MikroTik wiki before you put RouterOS configs into a production home lab.

My strong recommendation: start with SwOS for the first 30 days. Get your VLANs and QoS dialed in. If you find yourself wanting routing or scripting at the switch (rare), switch to RouterOS later — the config is wiped on firmware swap, but the SwOS config is simple enough to recreate in an hour.

Setting Up 10G to a Synology DS923+ — Step by Step

This is the build that justifies buying the CRS326 in the first place. Here's the actual sequence.

Parts you need: CRS326 ($219), one MikroTik S+DA0001 DAC cable ($25, 1m passive copper), Synology E10G22-T1-Mini PCIe 10GbE NIC ($199), one slot in the Synology DS923+. Total: ~$443 to put 10G between the switch and the NAS.

Install the Synology NIC: power down the DS923+, remove the case, insert the E10G22 in the single PCIe slot, reseat case. On boot, DSM auto-detects the card and exposes it as LAN 3 in Control Panel → Network. The Synology 10GbE card uses 10GBASE-T (copper) — but we're using DAC, so we need an SFP+ on the DS923+ side. Wait — the E10G22 is RJ45 only. We need a different path.

Correct parts: instead of the E10G22, use the Synology E10G18-T1 ($179, copper 10GBASE-T) and pair with a 10GBASE-T SFP+ module (MikroTik S+RJ10, $59) on the switch side. Total: $219 + $179 + $59 = $457. Slightly more, but it's actually-supported.

Configure the switch side: in SwOS, set port SFP1 as access for VLAN 10 (the storage VLAN), set link speed to 10G fixed. In DSM, set LAN 3 with a static IP in the storage VLAN. Test: copy a 10GB file from a Proxmox VM (also on storage VLAN, via a 10GBASE-T-equipped node) to the Synology. You should see 600-800MB/s sustained, which is the practical limit of two RAID-1 mirrored CMR drives on the Synology side. Bottleneck is now the disks, not the network — exactly where you want it.

If your Proxmox node only has gigabit NICs, you're still bottlenecked at 100MB/s on the VM-to-NAS path, but VMs on the same node can talk to each other over the local bridge at SSD speeds. The 10G backbone unlocks future upgrades, even before all clients are 10G.

What the CRS326 Doesn't Have (and What You'll Want Next)

Three honest limitations.

No PoE. None. Zero. If you want to power UniFi APs or PoE cameras, you need a separate PoE switch or PoE injectors. The cheapest add: a TP-Link TL-SG108PE ($79) for an 8-port PoE+ accessory, total cost $298 for switching + PoE. Or buy a single Ubiquiti U-POE-AT injector ($25) per AP — fine for 1-2 APs, ugly cabling for more. The CRS326 stays in the rack for backbone work; PoE lives on a dedicated switch nearby.

Fan noise at default. The CRS326 has two small fans that run at ~40% by default — measured at ~38-42dB at the rack. That's fine for a closet, audible in a finished home office. The fix: open SwOS → System → Configuration → set fans to 'manual' and set the duty cycle to 30%. The switch is fanless-rated for typical home-lab loads (no PoE = low heat) and will run cool at 30% fan speed indefinitely. Some users go fully passive (set duty 0) and report no thermal issues, but I'd leave a baseline fan running for longevity.

No true SFP+ DAC cross-vendor reliability. MikroTik SFP+ cages are picky. MikroTik-branded DACs work flawlessly; Cisco DACs sometimes work; generic Amazon DACs work maybe 60% of the time. Budget for MikroTik S+DA0001 ($25/cable, passive 1m or 3m) and don't try to save $10 on no-name DACs. The hour you'll lose troubleshooting a link that won't come up is worth more than the $10 savings.

CRS326 vs UniFi USW-24-PoE vs Netgear GS324T — When Each Wins

These are the three switches that get cross-shopped at this tier.

CRS326 ($219, 24x1G + 2x SFP+, no PoE): wins on price-per-port and 10G uplink. Loses on PoE, fan noise, and learning curve. The right pick if you already have a separate PoE switch and you want a 10G backbone for under $250.

UniFi USW-24-PoE ($399, 24x1G + 2x SFP, 8 PoE+ ports, 95W budget): wins on integrated PoE and UniFi controller integration. Loses on price-per-port (~$16/port vs $9) and limited PoE budget (95W is enough for 5-6 APs; runs out fast with cameras added). The right pick if you're committed to UniFi and want PoE + switching in one box, and you don't need 10G uplinks.

Netgear GS324T ($229, 24x1G + 4x SFP, no PoE, no SFP+): wins on simplest setup (Netgear Insight is genuinely beginner-friendly). Loses on no 10G uplink (the 4 SFP cages are 1G only — easy to misread the spec). The right pick if you don't need 10G now or ever, and you want the friendliest GUI in the category.

If 10G is on your roadmap (and for any serious home lab in 2026, it should be), the CRS326 is the answer. The $180 savings vs the UniFi pays for the 10GBASE-T SFP module ($59) with $120 left over for the Synology 10GbE NIC. The whole 10G upgrade is essentially free if you weren't already locked into UniFi.

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