Why is 10 Gb Ethernet still so expensive?

HEADRAT · 22 Jul 2020 at 16:36

I'm sure I saw 1TB Sandisc SSDs going for £85 each, that's not too far off

The X99 GA-X99-Designare is going to become my new NAS, just need to find a nice low power Xeon to go in it! It has one onboard m.2 and another you can just run off of PCI using a little board. So I'll probably pick up 2 x m.2 2TB SSD for 4TB of "fast" storage then some back drives.

Going to move away from XPenlogy so just got to decide on what to use next.

deuse · 22 Jul 2020 at 16:50

HEADRAT said:
I'm sure I saw 1TB Sandisc SSDs going for £85 each, that's not too far off

The X99 GA-X99-Designare is going to become my new NAS, just need to find a nice low power Xeon to go in it! It has one onboard m.2 and another you can just run off of PCI using a little board. So I'll probably pick up 2 x m.2 2TB SSD for 4TB of "fast" storage then some back drives.

Going to move away from XPenlogy so just got to decide on what to use next.

There is more then 10 Nas software OSs banging about.
It's going to be hard to chose the right one.

Armageus · 22 Jul 2020 at 16:58

HEADRAT said:
IGoing to move away from XPenlogy so just got to decide on what to use next.

I'd be interested to see what you move to, personally don't find any of the alternatives compelling (and I'm seriously considering rebuilding my Microserver with Windows Server and a Smartarray hardware RAID card)

BongoHunter · 22 Jul 2020 at 20:26

Armageus said:
I'd be interested to see what you move to, personally don't find any of the alternatives compelling (and I'm seriously considering rebuilding my Microserver with Windows Server and a Smartarray hardware RAID card)

I'm considering moving to any LTS type Linux release with decent ZFS suport - they've nearly all got nice web admin panels these days and you can configure a Linux box to do just about anything and more. Especially when compared to things like Freenas (which I'm going to be moving away from)

BongoHunter · 23 Jul 2020 at 10:29

Has anyone looked at or got the Buffalo BS-MP2008 8-Port?

Ive still not ordered a switch but have another NIC on the way so need to get a decent 10GBe switch ASAP - preferably managed switch with 8 ports (SPF+) uplink nice but not essesntial, in the unmanaged camp have found these available in UK/EU:

8 port at £350 for the Buffalo (they do a 12 port as well)
8 port at £430 for Netgear XS508M (has additional SPF+ port)
4 port at £285 for Netgear XS505M (has additional SPF+ port)
8 RJ45/SPF+ Combo ports at £500 for Qnap QSW-1208-8C (has 4 additional SPF+ ports)

8 10 gb ethernet ports + layer 3 I can only find a couple of Netgear models £475 and up for XS708* versions

Everything else is north of £500 - I think £400 is about my limit and as everything in that price range has pretty much the same features I'm leaning toward the Buffalo as its the cheapest per port. Have never used their stuff before - anyone else?

#Chri5# · 23 Jul 2020 at 10:46

Is the Zyxel XS1930-10 an option? Managed, 8 x 1G/2.5G/5G/10G copper and 2 x 10Gbps SFP+. I just found it for £380 inc VAT.

https://www.zyxel.com/uk/en/product...i-Gigabit-Smart-Managed-Switch-XS1930-Series/

I've never seen a Buffalo switch but used a number of Zyxel switches in my last job. They worked well.

Armageus · 23 Jul 2020 at 10:51

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs309_1g_8s_in
£216
and then some 10G RJ45 modules?

https://mikrotik.com/product/s_rj10
(although they are £67/each ouch!)

HEADRAT · 23 Jul 2020 at 10:59

I'm using QSFPTEK 10G SFP+ Copper RJ45, seem to work fine. (£53)

ChrisD. · 23 Jul 2020 at 11:09

MikroTik were the cheapest the last I looked.

BongoHunter · 23 Jul 2020 at 11:18

The Zyxel XS1930-10 looks good - will look into that one. Thanks @#Chri5#

@Armageus @HEADRAT I'd rather stick to RJ45 as the motherboards I'm interested in for my next couple of upgrades have 10GBe anyway.

Though small quiet SPF+ switches are avaialbe - am not sure the savings are that great for me as I'll be needing 3 modules which don't appear that cheap new, and I'll need to check they work with the NIC and switch (unless anyone already using one with Aquantia AQC-107 based NICs?) - I'll also have to buy more modules in the future.

I think it will only make sense if I can get them for about £30ish per port - I need to do some sums to check..!

HEADRAT · 23 Jul 2020 at 16:28

I already had a bag full of 10G SFP+ Modules (LC) so for me a SFP based switch was the cheapest option.

Wizzkidy · 23 Jul 2020 at 20:09

BongoHunter said:
Has anyone looked at or got the Buffalo BS-MP2008 8-Port?

Hiya,

Yes I have and am using it for my x3 DL380 G8 VMware host environment, it works fine, VLAN support and does the job

I have a freenas system with NFS datastore with 10gb connectivity as well as 10gb vMotion yeet!

WJA96 · 23 Jul 2020 at 23:14

Armageus said:
https://mikrotik.com/product/crs309_1g_8s_in
£216
and then some 10G RJ45 modules?

https://mikrotik.com/product/s_rj10
(although they are £67/each ouch!)

Better to just go for the CRS312 which is 12 ports - 12 RJ45 or 8 RJ45 and 4 SFP+

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs312_4c_8xg_rm - should be £425-ish depending on where you buy it.

deuse · 24 Jul 2020 at 07:36

After days of testing, I can say that running steam games from a 10GB nas is no different then my PC with SSDs

BongoHunter · 3 Aug 2020 at 15:56

BongoHunter said:
Has anyone looked at or got the Buffalo BS-MP2008 8-Port?

Ive still not ordered a switch but have another NIC on the way so need to get a decent 10GBe switch ASAP - preferably managed switch with 8 ports (SPF+) uplink nice but not essesntial, in the unmanaged camp have found these available in UK/EU:

8 port at £350 for the Buffalo (they do a 12 port as well)
8 port at £430 for Netgear XS508M (has additional SPF+ port)
4 port at £285 for Netgear XS505M (has additional SPF+ port)
8 RJ45/SPF+ Combo ports at £500 for Qnap QSW-1208-8C (has 4 additional SPF+ ports)

8 10 gb ethernet ports + layer 3 I can only find a couple of Netgear models £475 and up for XS708* versions

Everything else is north of £500 - I think £400 is about my limit and as everything in that price range has pretty much the same features I'm leaning toward the Buffalo as its the cheapest per port. Have never used their stuff before - anyone else?

Just to follow this up I went for a Netgear XS508M in the end for £332 (8 * RJ45 + single SPF+)

Used money saved over the fancier models to pickup a Ryzen 2600X to replace the Pentium in my NAS

deuse · 4 Aug 2020 at 14:45

BongoHunter said:
Just to follow this up I went for a Netgear XS508M in the end for £332 (8 * RJ45 + single SPF+)

Used money saved over the fancier models to pickup a Ryzen 2600X to replace the Pentium in my NAS

Nice one.

My Qnap is doing very well with my steam games.

SumpNut · 6 Aug 2020 at 01:35

This may not be particularly useful for a lot of use cases, but something I have done is to add an additional two port 10gig network card into my dedicated pfsense router. These ports are tied into the LAN side of the router with a software bridge, so effectively all 3 LAN ports act as a virtual switch. It works well for me as I only have two 10gig devices (my main pc and my server), if you have more and enough PCIe slots, you could always add more!

A x86 processor is not power efficient compared to a proper switch, it is not really recommended by the pfsense community, but it does work and is incredibly cheap (approx £50ish for am Intel x540 based SuperMicro X540-AT2 AOC-STG-I2T from a well known online auction website)

Avalon · 6 Aug 2020 at 20:01

SumpNut said:
This may not be particularly useful for a lot of use cases, but something I have done is to add an additional two port 10gig network card into my dedicated pfsense router. These ports are tied into the LAN side of the router with a software bridge, so effectively all 3 LAN ports act as a virtual switch. It works well for me as I only have two 10gig devices (my main pc and my server), if you have more and enough PCIe slots, you could always add more!

A x86 processor is not power efficient compared to a proper switch, it is not really recommended by the pfsense community, but it does work and is incredibly cheap (approx £50ish for am Intel x540 based SuperMicro X540-AT2 AOC-STG-I2T from a well known online auction website)

Switching under software vs hardware unfortunately sucks, but NIC hardware is cheap (just beware ESXi dumping driver support in v7 if you virtualise) and the power increase is minimal if you're already running a x86/64 based firewall anyway. If you only have two devices that are 10Gb then personally i'm not sure i'd bother with the whole software switching side of things under pf - P2P seems a potentially better option. That said 2-4port SFP+ hardware isn't that expensive to do if you either buy ex-enterprise switches or the small Mikrotik stuff, if you want inefficient, look at the power numbers on the large SFP+ switches... the noise isn't much better and that's before you have to deal with licensing, which most of the time is just a minefield.

SumpNut · 6 Aug 2020 at 21:29

I'm well aware of the downsides of software switching and I tried to make that clear in my post. I was simply pointing out that this is how I run my network and it may be of use to someone looking to go 10gig on the cheap.

deuse · 6 Nov 2020 at 13:42

My SFP+ 10Gb Ethernet card has died

Anyone know of a cheap replacement?

Thanks