Hello I am looking for homelab router. I like to play with mangle rules and i need more cpu than L009 have. L009 is good L3 switch no router. I am looking for router which without fastrack have min 1Gb/s throughtput(with only nat, no firewall). I chosed RB1100AHx4(in low price) and RB5009. Which is better to homelab? Now I dont need sfp+ and 2.5Gb/s
Depends on what you’re doing.
I like the RB1100AHx4. And if you’re talking about a home Mikrotik lab, it be a great choice. You can add disks for lightweight RAID/NAS or Dude and have plenty of ports. It also has some unquie features too, like the off-line “bypass”/passthrough between port 11 to 12. i.e. if router is powered off, traffic will still flow between port 11 and 12 (so I use port 11 as WAN , so WAN is on 12 if router is turned off, or port 11-13 bridged when on). Really are good for experimenting. It just ain’t as fast as RB5009 however…
Other downside is it’s only ARM, not ARM64, so containers get a little tricker on it since there are less for arm/v7. And Rb1100AHx4 has a funky three-switch-chip design, so keeping hardware offloading requires following some rules.
I’d go with RB5009.
Number of ports can easily be extended using some managed switch (and you still have that L009 around, yes ?).
But isn’t 8 ports already plenty for homelab purposes ?
You say you don’t need SFP+ nor 2.5Gb now but what about “tomorrow” ?
For future safety, I’d choose RB5009.