Some sort of bottleneck on my gigabit network

When I first moved in I had my 8 port switch next to router running a single cable into my 5 port tp link switch and had no problems everything was running gigabit, at my previous property used same setup except the 8 port was in the living room and 5 port next to router.

When I first moved in I transferred a few files to my laptop which has gigabit and speed was amazing, then tried to 2nd desktop with gigabit and was amazing, only difference was it was direct.

I decided to get another gigabit switch as I have about 4 or 5 devices in bedroom(though not all wired up) and wanted room for any extras in future.

I put the 8 port in bedroom and new 5 port in living room.

Here is where the issues start, I tried between 2 desktops and the speed dropped almost instantly to transfer about 10 megabytes a second down to about 3 compared to almost constant 60-90 with gigabit, then today tried desktop 1 to laptop but wired direct into the 5 port next to router and it started off promising with 2 gig folder of various software, then stopped at 1 gig point, then about 2 minutes later did about 30 megabytes worth, then stopped same again etc.

Wireless is disabled so it cant be that.

Just wonder if my newer switch is a piece of junk? Could plugging it into a surge protector be affecting it?

Easy to rule out surge protector just bypass it for a while.

Not all switches are created equal and with unmanaged devices it is a case of playing around to see what works best. The more expensive managed devices let you configure traffic but you pay the price.

Check the cable(s) you're using - It could be that one of them are faulty. I've had this issue before where for some reason transmission speeds would hit rock bottom and fluctuate. Found out the patch cable I was using into the wall was dodgy.

Also how many files are you transferring? If you're transferring thousands of small files it's going to be MUCH slower than just one large file.

10MB/s sounds a lot like 100Mb/s Ethernet. Could be a faulty cable or a faulty port somewhere that is preventing it running at 1Gb/s. And as Mr Saffron posted, small files don't transfer at all well. I've never understood why but Windows' networking is horribly slow at opening files.