Is Your Linksys SD2008 Switch Overheating or Losing Connectivity?

Linksys SD2008 Gigabit Switch Issues

I usually don’t talk about routers and switches here on Legit Reviews, but I’m going to make an exception this time around. I purchased a Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switch from Best Buy late last year that was actually used to link together my personal computers to the Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) and the beloved Network-Attached Storage (NAS) box. Just a few weeks ago my LAN connection would just drop and I’d have to physically power down the Linksys SD2008 switch in order to get the LAN back up and running. While doing this over the next few weeks I noticed just how hot the Linksys SD2008 8-port Gigabit switch got (even in my cool basement). It got so hot that the rubber feet on the bottom of the router would actually slide off! With the connection dropping daily and super hot case issue I headed to the internet to see what others were saying about this drive after I bought it.

After typing in ‘Linksys SD2008 Heat Problem’ I found 433 listings in Google with those key words. One of the first links in Google was to the Newegg Customer Reviews, where 47% of those who have the drive rated it as poor or very poor. It seems the Linksys SD 2008 Gigabit Switch fails over time after reading the comments from the Newegg users. Next up was the Amazon.com customer reviews, where an impressive 65% gave it 2 stars or less on a 5 star scale. After reading dozens of reviews from a half dozen other sites it seemed that losing connectivity with the network was fairly common. The cause of the issues? It seemed that heat was causing a capacitor to blow up on a number Linksys SD2008 V2.1 switches. The original version 1.0 Linksys SD2008 switches came with a cooling fan inside, but was removed on later revisions due to the noise level of the fan. The version I had was v2.2, which didn’t have a fan and was running very hot. Some people on the internet are even changing capacitors and trying to ‘upgrade’ these switches while others are saying that the problem is fixed in newer version 3.0 switches.

This was news you didn’t want to hear after spending nearly one hundred dollars on a router! I like to get things fixed quickly, so I went back up to Best Buy and purchased another brand new Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switch with my fingers crossed that I would get a newer version.

I opened the box and noticed that the label on the box said that it was version 3.0, success! I fired up the ‘new’ switch and instantly noticed that it was cooler. This got me interested in seeing what Linksys changed, so I opened up both switches and the differences are major to say the least.

The printed circuit board (PCB) in both Linksys SD2008 Gigabit switches different versions and the power/voltage regulation was re-designed. No wonder there was a temperature drop, the switch is pretty much new from the ground up on the inside and only the outside and model number have remained the same.