Planning a home 10Gbe network

miksh72 · 20 Jul 2023 at 18:02

I built 5 pcs for my home network last year using 12th generation i7, i5, i3, g7400 and g6900 cpus and mainly Asrock H610 motherboards, I am trying to upgrade the network from gigabit to 10Gbe. 25/40/100Gbe is out of my price range.

I have a couple of Mellanox ConnectX-2 NICs and a DAC cables and the transfer rates are around 8 to 10 faster either way compared to the gigabit, so I would like to take it a couple of stages further and see what I can get. The NICs connect into the one PCIe 4.0 x16 each pc has available.

You can buy Mikrotek CRS305 switches for around £160. These have four SFP+ (10Gbe) ports and one gigabyte. So I can connect three of the PCs to this and use the remaining SFP+ port to connect to a Synology or QNap NAS drive. I've got a QNap 2.5Gb switch and a couple of TP-Link 2.5Gb cards for the other two PCs.

All the equipment is in one room so several 1m to 3m SFP+ cables will be ok. Can anyone recommend the best 4 to 6 bay NAS drive to pop a 10Gbe NIC into and what are the potential bottlenecks to stop me getting 10Gbps? Will standard WD Red Plus NAS drives mirrored ok?

Thanks for any advice.

Mike

ChrisD. · 20 Jul 2023 at 19:34

You won’t saturate 10 GbE with a couple of spinners in your NAS. You need SSD of some form to achieve that and it gets expensive for proper drives that can take NAS punishment.

What’s the use case?

miksh72 · 21 Jul 2023 at 10:20

Thanks Chris, I support several server based networks and I am switching a couple of those to cloud based servers when their Server 20xx reaches end of life, but the majority want to remain inhouse server based. These networks are small - 8 to 25 users. Some. I believe, would benefit from a faster cards and these could use a NAS, others would see none and I am leaving these alone.

So really just a testing exercise.

Wizzkidy · 24 Jul 2023 at 20:25

Switch BS-MP2008 - Buffalo Technology

BS-MP2008 – 8 ports Finally, a value Switch scalable to 10 GbE. 10Gigabit Layer2 Switches. Buffalo’s BS-MP series of 10 GbE switches offers an easy, cost-effective and energy-efficient way to extend your business network at blazing speeds. Plug and play installation requires no additional...

www.buffalo-technology.com

I have two of these for my VMWare VSAN home lab, work fine. Cheap as well considering they are 10Gb ethernet, cba with SFP

miksh72 · 25 Jul 2023 at 09:57

I've got a Buffalo 520d NAS drive and no problems after 5 years 24/7 use.

I didn't realise they did 10Gbe sthuff - will look now.

Thanks.