StarTech.com 16 Port 1U Rackmount USB KVM Switch with OSD

Product Overview

AI-generated summary

At ~£483 ex-VAT, this StarTech 16-port USB rack KVM with OSD is only “good value” if you truly need 16 discrete server connections in a 1U footprint and you’ll use the OSD-driven switching day to day. In real deployments, the pain point isn’t usually the first install—it’s living with latency, keyboard/mouse weirdness, and constant edge-case behavior. StarTech tends to be fairly solid on compatibility (especially with USB devices) and the OSD matters because it speeds up recovery when you need to identify/route consoles quickly without crawling behind the rack.

That said, I wouldn’t buy this for a small setup or for anything where you only need a handful of servers. 16-port units like this often end up being “bought for the future” and then the ports sit unused; meanwhile you’re still paying for the complexity and power/space of a bigger switch than you need. It’s a sensible choice for UK IT teams managing multiple legacy or “no local access” systems in a rack—datacentre-ish, server rooms, managed environments—but if your world is mostly modern hardware with remote management, you may be better served by lighter-touch remote console solutions instead of tying up console switching to a hardware KVM.