I've had a CRS304-4XG for a while now, and about 6 months ago I finally got 10G NICs so that I could utilize it fully. Throughput and link stability (once established) are great, but one thing has been very annoying: retried link negotiations.
After a bunch of tests with various 10G NICs with this switch (and without) I am starting to suspect that something is wrong with the switch itself. I have a CLUB3D CAC-2531 (RTL8159), ASUS XG-C100C V3 (AQC107) and a Zyxel XGN100Cv3 (RTL8127), cat7 and 8 cables are connecting them to the switch. With all of these when I first enable the interface, it can take from only 12 to as much as 25 seconds for a ping -t to start going through.
In the switch's logs I can only see that a port goes up or down, a more telling view of this is Windows's Network Connections panel. I toggle the NICs here for my testing, where after enabling one it goes from Network cable unplugged -> Identifying -> Network cable unplugged -> Identifying -> "Network name".
If I manually set the link to 5GbE, it again becomes consistent and always takes about 8 seconds for the link to become usable, no repeated "Network cable unplugged" states are shown.
When any of these NICs are directly connected to each other with static IPs, skipping the switch, they consistently take 12 seconds to reach a successful ping after enabling the interface, no variability.
Things that don't seem to influence it:
Reverting to default config and trying with that
Ubuntu vs Windows
Moving to another switchport, all of them are the same
Cat5e vs cat8 cable
Different drivers for the NICs
So I am here now, wondering if anybody else is experiencing this issue with CRS304-4XG, and if I should RMA it or try something else?