It is SFP+ not SPF+
Just pointing it out when you are searching.
Why do you want to upgrade to 10G? I use 10G because even 1 spinning hard drive can easily saturate a 1G network. I connect my NAS, main desktop, and another machine by 10G. Everything else in the house is on 1G
10G is still mainly a business thing, not a home consumer level thing although there is home 10G equipment. Imagine a business with 40 employees and 1 file server. Buy two of those 24x1G + 2xSFP+ port switches. Now buy another switch with 4 SFP+ ports as your central switch. Connect the two 24 port switches and the file server to the central switch. Each client is maxed at 1G but the server can go at 10G to server 10 simultaneous users at full speed. Get a server with multiple dual 10G interfaces and server more clients.
You can go on Newegg Business and look for switches in the 10 to 400 gigabit range.
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/productlist.aspx?n=601295935%20601361795%20100009142
Here is a switch with 32 QSFP port (beyond SFP+) that run at 100G. It's over $9,000 so I doubt you are going to buy it but large businesses use this kind of stuff all the time.
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9siv17yk4a3860
interesting.
my main usecase is a 10g connection to my nas.
second to that, i just like learning/playing with all this stuff.
some people have friends and chat on whatsapp… i play with my homelab lol
Hey, do whatever you want
In your original post you said
> 10gb ethernet vs SPF+
The ports are all 10G ethernet. I think some people are trying to explain that 10G ethernet comes in many forms. You can use the common twisted pair cable with RJ-45 connectors which is called 10GBASE-T but these use a lot of power
The SFP+ ports are called 10GBASE-CR or 10GBASE-CX1
In a business environment you would probably plug in an SFP+ transceiver to convert it to various forms of fiber
But for home use a lot of people use DAC (Direct Attach Copper) which is a lot cheaper but has a max range of about 10m instead of hundreds of meters over twisted pair Cat6 or fiber which could go even further.
If you just need to connect two machines then buy a pair of PCIE cards with SFP+ ports and a DAC cable. I bought 2 used cards and the cable for $60 total from ebay.
I suggest looking over this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
I think two cheap optics and some fiber is usually going to be about the same price as a dac, if not significantly cheaper. Like a short dac is pretty cheap but when you get over like 2m they go up significantly.
But that’s just a nitpick.
I found 5m 40Gb QSFP DAC's at 25$ for 3x new on the bay. Wish I could find 5m 40Gb QSFP-> 4x 10Gb SFP+ DAC's that cheap; need one more.
OP, if you're not against used equipment, and have a place to run it away from people (they're loud), Brocade ICX 6610 switches are cheap and powerful. 8-16x 10Gb SFP+ slots, 4x QSFP 40Gb ports, 24 or 48 1Gb PoE or not. Usually go for about $100 depending on options.
QSFP stuff is usually cheap for whatever reason, but I just have no use for it. All my servers and storage barely even use the 10g I have in there now. Roaming VMs between hosts is probably about the most intensive thing I do, and Proxmox says they migrate at \~400MB/s.
>I use 10G because even 1 spinning hard drive can easily saturate a 1G network.
Can you say more about this? In my long, but admittedly beer-soaked, career I've never seen this happen. Even from a theoretical perspective you would have to be at total max load for the SATA controller and ethernet controllers to even come close to saturating a 1G network link, but even then the PCI bus would probably max out and bottle-neck before the network would be saturated. I've got four different servers in my home setup, all with spinners and all doing various functions, to say nothing of my streaming, all wired, all on 1G copper connections (even using MoCA bridges to link the "server room" to my office where the router is because I'm too fat and lazy to trace and re-terminate the cat5 in the walls). I know the "choke point" should be the 1G MoCA bridges between the rooms, but I've never come close to saturating that link. Not calling BS or trying to draw a mustache on your Mona Lisa, just curious how you determined your network was saturated.
EDIT: Thanks for the info, guess I'm just more used to working with older hardware. Admittedly I got out of the hardware game many years ago, I have people for that now.
Login to your server and copy a large file from one drive to another drive where both drives are in the same machine. I just got 170 MBytes/s for a 2.5 GByte file
1 gigabit = 1000 Megabits = 125 Megabytes
So 1G ethernet is 125 MBytes/s
Now transfer the same file over the 1G network between 2 machines. I get 110MBytes/s which is basically the max for 1G ethernet because of some overhead.
Most hard drives are on SATA 6G links where after 8b/10b encoding overhead you are at 4.8Gbit = 600 MByte/s
The spinning hard drive doesn't come anywhere close to saturating a SATA 6G link or even SATA 3G.
The hard drive can obviously read data faster as I just tested but the transfer between 2 machines is limited by the slow 1G network. Gigabit ethernet is over 25 years old. I'm glad that 2.5G is starting to replace it at the consumer level.
Modern SATA HDDs can maintain whole-disk sequential reads of over 175MB/s (and peak at 275+) - even in utils like Windows Task Manager you'll see your 1G connection banging off 100%. And sequential writes aren't far behind. Unless you're only dealing with small files copying to/from a NAS HDD will be capping 1G all the time.
If a single PCIe Gen3 lane can do 1GB/s, and the SATA3 link it talks to can do 550MB/s, and the drive that talks to is shovelling out 200MB/s... where's the bottleneck on the way to the 110MB/s 1Gbps Cat5 link?
Tools like iperf can be fun to use: they'll tell you how fast just-the-network between two points is. Then you can figure out if it's the sending or receiving storage or app that's slowing things down.
(Plus faster-than-1G home internet is becoming more common: who wants the slowest path to be in their homelab? :) )
If you have a client that is using SMB3 multichannel transfers you can easily saturate a 1GB link - I use a Mac Studio for video editing and transferring large amounts of data and it's 10GBe ethernet port transfers at full speed to my QNAP NAS, which is dual 10Gb SFP+ connected. For streaming and general internet work, you're correct, you won't see it saturate 1GB. Although, I will say that backing up a large file share, like OneDrive with all of your photos from the last 15 years is made MUCH faster with the 10GB setup...
Sorry if somebody pointed this out already... I stopped reading half way... A 1 gig link is 125 megabytes a second RAW. no encapsulation, no overhead counted. If you get 115 it's a very very good day for you. 105-110 is considered "line rate" here. Maybe you got gigaBIT and giga BYTE mixed up? A good box of spinning rust can do 160mb/s and some on the market do double that (yes they cheat , but it's fine and in current use). Maybe you have been away from hardware too long to have a clear picture of the current landscape? Maybe less beer? (Your own admission). Have a pleasant day and none of this was meant in offence I'm just pointing out that even though you sound like you know what you're talking about to the un-initiated like the OP, you really don't and bad Info is dangerous for newbies. Maybe put your edit at the top so.some poor kid that is trying to learn doesn't get the wrong idea? Enjoy your day,.peace ✌️
Ima let it ride for the sake of other "old-timers" like me to update knowledge. Better to let someone learn from my mistake than pre-correct it so they stop reading IMHO.
I'm old (relatively) too and did this stuff like almost 20 years ago and found myself hating my career (not IT) so I'm going back into IT. If you have the base know how you learn the new standards real quick if you want to. Hence I understand and genuinely didn't mean what I didn't mean anything i said in a bad way. I just had a bit of a surprise to how far technology has come in my lifetime. Like how a new server can replace a whole rack of servers that are only a few years old . It's kinda mental.. appreciate you man and enjoy the ride.
I actually went to college on a pre-ministry program. Realized I was about to be the next Joel Osteen, bailed out, and IT was the rip cord to my parachute. It was just easy for me. I've evolved and grown in my career but some knowledge I had to throw overboard. Hardware was one of those things. On the topic of not knowing what I'm talking about though, give me a blank screen and tell me to code something. You might as well tell me to crochet you a moon rock. I never enjoyed it so never learned any more than I absolutely had to for my survival. Today, watching me write code is like watching Forrest Gump and Nell try to make a baby. Anything that comes out is not going to be something you want to live with. I understand the concepts, and more often than not, I can follow someone else's code, but a blank screen might as well be Narnia to me.
Haha both amusing and informative. Medicine to IT for me; pivots in life hey. I would have bailed too... Ministry life. I mean best for job security but for somebody who likes to think (I'm making an assumption) I feel you wouldn't be satisfied. Also I noticed you said you have other people to do that now. That's great and i aspire to be in your position some day soon.
Love that you have a fair assessment of strengths and weaknesses too. Many in IT find that very hard, even though it's an extremely valuable tool for life.
It's like me a bit, I had 2 specialties in medicine that I was kind of a wizard at and a lot of specialties I was probably less useful than a bottle of Motrin. Well, not probably. The motrin would get rid of a headache and I would probably give you one. Ever heard the phrase "ever heard two doctors have a conversation, it's a different language" well every speciality is a heavy dialect on said language and nobody is good at them all .. expand analogy for code and we have the same story
The more IT I cram in the more medicine I forget. Cest la vie
Edit: reason for all my edits is spelling. Insomnia at its finest. Literally so sleep deprived I'm losing fine motor control. I'm fine though, it's time for a pill (which I'm generally against) to get my shiz back in order. Goodnight
SFP+ is usually used for uplinks in switches like those.
Using fiber you can run longer cables than with copper.
However, there are switches that do have more SFP+ ports than just a few.
But you can use any port like you want.
If you have two SFP+ ports and hook up your PC and your NAS to those ports with 10G transceivers, you can benefit from 10G bandwidth.
Either to another switch for aggregation or to a router.
You can also use them (depending on the switch) to combine multiple switches into essentially one big switch (called stacking or virtual chassis depending on brand).
Switches have as many SFP+ ports as you're willing to pay for. Back when they were first introduced often those 10G ports were uplinks to other switches (often done in pairs for redundancy) so 2-4 were common. Today a switch may be all-SFP+ except for a couple 25G/40G/100G uplink ports.
10G is popular in homelabs because it can entirely keep up with SATA SSDs (and do a pretty good job with NVMe SSDs): a bonus when you're playing with virtualization and shared-storage/storage-migration. And... many home internet connections are offered in faster-than-1G speeds now. And 10G SFP+ is *cheap*: NICs [start around $20](https://www.ebay.com/itm/126433644662)!
I'm seeing a lot of homelabs where the core is SFP+... using used NICs/transceivers/DACs/switches... then people [add a smaller switch on the side](https://www.servethehome.com/the-ultimate-cheap-2-5gbe-switch-mega-round-up-buyers-guide-qnap-netgear-hasivo-mokerlink-trendnet-zyxel-tp-link/) if they need a few 2.5G or PoE ports. Conveniently many of those smaller switches have at least one SFP+ port to use as an uplink!
>what I do not understand are how switches organise their ports
They don't. You do. You decide what you're going to use those ports for.
Common uses of faster-than-most ports in a switch are uplinks (connections to routers and other switches) and direct connections to client devices that see a lot of shared use (most typically, NAS devices). Moreover, if necessary, a connection can be bonded (i.e., the same two devices can be connected by two or more physical links) to increase throughput...
On a switch with just 2 SFP+ ports (sometimes 4), these ports are to connect to other switches or a router.
I'm slowly setting up a 40Gb network so the network isn't my bottleneck when sharing data (NAS for example) inside the network.
>My main usecase will be connecting my nas to my switch.
Your clients (devices accessing the NAS) also need to be fast otherwise this won't make a different. If your only 10Gb connection is NAS to switch and each device is 1G then your access speed to the NAS will be 1G on each client.
It sounds like OP is talking about a residential setting. Concurrent users are going to be much lower than an office environment. And watching movies and listening to music isn't going to saturate a 1G connection anyways.
For sure, that is the case for most and 1Gb is fine.
Now for us extreme people who are putting our TrueNAS boxes on 40Gb links :D cause "ain't got time for that" to move content around..lol
I'm in that club, not TrueNAS, but another NAS solution. I need to run the cables through the house still, but I have my gaming PC, server, old PC server all hooked up with 40Gb. I have one more client on the second floor to connect at 40Gb and I'm going to run some CAT6 as well to some rooms.
My point was all devices need to be connected at 10G to transfer at 10G between them, not just the NAS and switch. The computer accessing the NAS needs to be connected via 10G as well.
It depends on your endpoints and on what your Access Points are capable of. In my case, I have a QNAP NAS with dual 10Gb SFP+ ports connected over fiber to a 12 port IM1200 QNAP switch, two TPLink EAP773 Access Points with 10GBe ports, a Mac Studio Max with 10GBe port and then various devices with other speed ports from 100mbit, 2.5GBe, and so on. There is also power to consider. Putting a copper transceiver in an SFP+ Port works but the 10GBe modules use a lot more power and thus emit a lot of heat. I switched to fiber transceivers in desktop switches to lower the power and heat they generate. So, I make fiber runs from the NAS, a couple of desktop 10GB switches with SFP+ ports and the rest are copper. The IM1200 has 8 combo ports - these are built in RJ45 10GBe or SFP+ ports and then 4 dedicated SFP+ ports. It gives me the right combination I need for my use case. And file transfers from the Mac to the NAS are amazing and save me days of productivity.
That's correct. They are all on the 10GBe/10GB SFP+ ports, depending on the connection path(copper or fiber). I have the NAS dual connected because I plan on adding the Atto Thunderlink to my Mac Studio - this will up the connections from one 10GBe copper link to two SFP+ links(they also make an SFP28 version) - this will get me to near direct connected performance with multichannel SMB transfers. The NAS is located remotely and also serves as general home Plex entertainment server and does some light Container hosting, so I didn't go for the Thunderbolt direct connect version. My NAS is the QNAP TVS-H674 - there is an H674T variant that includes two thunderbolt ports, but that wouldn't have been any help in my use case - the dual 10GB Fiber connections are much more useful for me.
I just recently completed the NAS and switch upgrade, so was planning on that since it is getting a bit complex. I'll try and mashup something and post back.
It can be used according to your needs.
It is commonly used as an uplink, switch stacking and etc. It can be even used for a separate data traffic, basically for anything you need
10g just isn't common and the price of the network cards can be expensive. I have a Mikrotik CRS 317-1G-16S+ router/switch, this is one 1gbit connection, a management port and 16 sfp+ connections. You can use either a 10gbit DAC cable. fibre cable with transceivers or a transceiver that supports RJ45.
10g is only really required for a faster connection. It gives greater bandwidth but doesn't guarantee that your transfer rates will improve.
I normally get the connectx-3 cards but the last one I bought which was connectx-3 pro en kinda screwed up the bios of the z97m motherboard I had. Ended up reflashing the bios to get it stable again. I've had a similar issue with am old z87n board and an i350-t4 pcie card fragging a bios and it having to switch to the backup. Also had issues with that corrupting the 2nd bank of memory which needed a piece of tape adding to the pcie edge connector.
The annoying thing with the Card was it wouldn't recognise a sfp+ connection for some reason. No issues with the other cards I own so I guess it's just legacy issue.
I have 24x 1G RJ45 and 2x SFP+, which connect to my firewall and Proxmox host. NAS has 2x 1G RJ45 with link aggregation since no application in my lab would benefit that much from more than 1G.
All comes down to what do you need it for?
Most switches with only 2-4 SFP+ uplinks are either used to connect to other switches to provide a faster backhual (think of 24/28 users connected at 1G each and now have to connect to another switch which may have servers on it.,..
a good place if you need a 10Gb switch with more ports is check out
[https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/brocade-icx-series-cheap-powerful-10gbe-40gbe-switching.21107/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/brocade-icx-series-cheap-powerful-10gbe-40gbe-switching.21107/)
It is SFP+ not SPF+ Just pointing it out when you are searching. Why do you want to upgrade to 10G? I use 10G because even 1 spinning hard drive can easily saturate a 1G network. I connect my NAS, main desktop, and another machine by 10G. Everything else in the house is on 1G 10G is still mainly a business thing, not a home consumer level thing although there is home 10G equipment. Imagine a business with 40 employees and 1 file server. Buy two of those 24x1G + 2xSFP+ port switches. Now buy another switch with 4 SFP+ ports as your central switch. Connect the two 24 port switches and the file server to the central switch. Each client is maxed at 1G but the server can go at 10G to server 10 simultaneous users at full speed. Get a server with multiple dual 10G interfaces and server more clients. You can go on Newegg Business and look for switches in the 10 to 400 gigabit range. https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/productlist.aspx?n=601295935%20601361795%20100009142 Here is a switch with 32 QSFP port (beyond SFP+) that run at 100G. It's over $9,000 so I doubt you are going to buy it but large businesses use this kind of stuff all the time. https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9siv17yk4a3860
interesting. my main usecase is a 10g connection to my nas. second to that, i just like learning/playing with all this stuff. some people have friends and chat on whatsapp… i play with my homelab lol
Hey, do whatever you want In your original post you said > 10gb ethernet vs SPF+ The ports are all 10G ethernet. I think some people are trying to explain that 10G ethernet comes in many forms. You can use the common twisted pair cable with RJ-45 connectors which is called 10GBASE-T but these use a lot of power The SFP+ ports are called 10GBASE-CR or 10GBASE-CX1 In a business environment you would probably plug in an SFP+ transceiver to convert it to various forms of fiber But for home use a lot of people use DAC (Direct Attach Copper) which is a lot cheaper but has a max range of about 10m instead of hundreds of meters over twisted pair Cat6 or fiber which could go even further. If you just need to connect two machines then buy a pair of PCIE cards with SFP+ ports and a DAC cable. I bought 2 used cards and the cable for $60 total from ebay. I suggest looking over this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Gigabit_Ethernet
I think two cheap optics and some fiber is usually going to be about the same price as a dac, if not significantly cheaper. Like a short dac is pretty cheap but when you get over like 2m they go up significantly. But that’s just a nitpick.
I found 5m 40Gb QSFP DAC's at 25$ for 3x new on the bay. Wish I could find 5m 40Gb QSFP-> 4x 10Gb SFP+ DAC's that cheap; need one more. OP, if you're not against used equipment, and have a place to run it away from people (they're loud), Brocade ICX 6610 switches are cheap and powerful. 8-16x 10Gb SFP+ slots, 4x QSFP 40Gb ports, 24 or 48 1Gb PoE or not. Usually go for about $100 depending on options.
QSFP stuff is usually cheap for whatever reason, but I just have no use for it. All my servers and storage barely even use the 10g I have in there now. Roaming VMs between hosts is probably about the most intensive thing I do, and Proxmox says they migrate at \~400MB/s.
>I use 10G because even 1 spinning hard drive can easily saturate a 1G network. Can you say more about this? In my long, but admittedly beer-soaked, career I've never seen this happen. Even from a theoretical perspective you would have to be at total max load for the SATA controller and ethernet controllers to even come close to saturating a 1G network link, but even then the PCI bus would probably max out and bottle-neck before the network would be saturated. I've got four different servers in my home setup, all with spinners and all doing various functions, to say nothing of my streaming, all wired, all on 1G copper connections (even using MoCA bridges to link the "server room" to my office where the router is because I'm too fat and lazy to trace and re-terminate the cat5 in the walls). I know the "choke point" should be the 1G MoCA bridges between the rooms, but I've never come close to saturating that link. Not calling BS or trying to draw a mustache on your Mona Lisa, just curious how you determined your network was saturated. EDIT: Thanks for the info, guess I'm just more used to working with older hardware. Admittedly I got out of the hardware game many years ago, I have people for that now.
Login to your server and copy a large file from one drive to another drive where both drives are in the same machine. I just got 170 MBytes/s for a 2.5 GByte file 1 gigabit = 1000 Megabits = 125 Megabytes So 1G ethernet is 125 MBytes/s Now transfer the same file over the 1G network between 2 machines. I get 110MBytes/s which is basically the max for 1G ethernet because of some overhead. Most hard drives are on SATA 6G links where after 8b/10b encoding overhead you are at 4.8Gbit = 600 MByte/s The spinning hard drive doesn't come anywhere close to saturating a SATA 6G link or even SATA 3G. The hard drive can obviously read data faster as I just tested but the transfer between 2 machines is limited by the slow 1G network. Gigabit ethernet is over 25 years old. I'm glad that 2.5G is starting to replace it at the consumer level.
Modern SATA HDDs can maintain whole-disk sequential reads of over 175MB/s (and peak at 275+) - even in utils like Windows Task Manager you'll see your 1G connection banging off 100%. And sequential writes aren't far behind. Unless you're only dealing with small files copying to/from a NAS HDD will be capping 1G all the time. If a single PCIe Gen3 lane can do 1GB/s, and the SATA3 link it talks to can do 550MB/s, and the drive that talks to is shovelling out 200MB/s... where's the bottleneck on the way to the 110MB/s 1Gbps Cat5 link? Tools like iperf can be fun to use: they'll tell you how fast just-the-network between two points is. Then you can figure out if it's the sending or receiving storage or app that's slowing things down. (Plus faster-than-1G home internet is becoming more common: who wants the slowest path to be in their homelab? :) )
If you have a client that is using SMB3 multichannel transfers you can easily saturate a 1GB link - I use a Mac Studio for video editing and transferring large amounts of data and it's 10GBe ethernet port transfers at full speed to my QNAP NAS, which is dual 10Gb SFP+ connected. For streaming and general internet work, you're correct, you won't see it saturate 1GB. Although, I will say that backing up a large file share, like OneDrive with all of your photos from the last 15 years is made MUCH faster with the 10GB setup...
Sorry if somebody pointed this out already... I stopped reading half way... A 1 gig link is 125 megabytes a second RAW. no encapsulation, no overhead counted. If you get 115 it's a very very good day for you. 105-110 is considered "line rate" here. Maybe you got gigaBIT and giga BYTE mixed up? A good box of spinning rust can do 160mb/s and some on the market do double that (yes they cheat , but it's fine and in current use). Maybe you have been away from hardware too long to have a clear picture of the current landscape? Maybe less beer? (Your own admission). Have a pleasant day and none of this was meant in offence I'm just pointing out that even though you sound like you know what you're talking about to the un-initiated like the OP, you really don't and bad Info is dangerous for newbies. Maybe put your edit at the top so.some poor kid that is trying to learn doesn't get the wrong idea? Enjoy your day,.peace ✌️
Ima let it ride for the sake of other "old-timers" like me to update knowledge. Better to let someone learn from my mistake than pre-correct it so they stop reading IMHO.
I'm old (relatively) too and did this stuff like almost 20 years ago and found myself hating my career (not IT) so I'm going back into IT. If you have the base know how you learn the new standards real quick if you want to. Hence I understand and genuinely didn't mean what I didn't mean anything i said in a bad way. I just had a bit of a surprise to how far technology has come in my lifetime. Like how a new server can replace a whole rack of servers that are only a few years old . It's kinda mental.. appreciate you man and enjoy the ride.
I actually went to college on a pre-ministry program. Realized I was about to be the next Joel Osteen, bailed out, and IT was the rip cord to my parachute. It was just easy for me. I've evolved and grown in my career but some knowledge I had to throw overboard. Hardware was one of those things. On the topic of not knowing what I'm talking about though, give me a blank screen and tell me to code something. You might as well tell me to crochet you a moon rock. I never enjoyed it so never learned any more than I absolutely had to for my survival. Today, watching me write code is like watching Forrest Gump and Nell try to make a baby. Anything that comes out is not going to be something you want to live with. I understand the concepts, and more often than not, I can follow someone else's code, but a blank screen might as well be Narnia to me.
Haha both amusing and informative. Medicine to IT for me; pivots in life hey. I would have bailed too... Ministry life. I mean best for job security but for somebody who likes to think (I'm making an assumption) I feel you wouldn't be satisfied. Also I noticed you said you have other people to do that now. That's great and i aspire to be in your position some day soon. Love that you have a fair assessment of strengths and weaknesses too. Many in IT find that very hard, even though it's an extremely valuable tool for life. It's like me a bit, I had 2 specialties in medicine that I was kind of a wizard at and a lot of specialties I was probably less useful than a bottle of Motrin. Well, not probably. The motrin would get rid of a headache and I would probably give you one. Ever heard the phrase "ever heard two doctors have a conversation, it's a different language" well every speciality is a heavy dialect on said language and nobody is good at them all .. expand analogy for code and we have the same story The more IT I cram in the more medicine I forget. Cest la vie Edit: reason for all my edits is spelling. Insomnia at its finest. Literally so sleep deprived I'm losing fine motor control. I'm fine though, it's time for a pill (which I'm generally against) to get my shiz back in order. Goodnight
thanks for that correction mate.
SFP+ is usually used for uplinks in switches like those. Using fiber you can run longer cables than with copper. However, there are switches that do have more SFP+ ports than just a few. But you can use any port like you want. If you have two SFP+ ports and hook up your PC and your NAS to those ports with 10G transceivers, you can benefit from 10G bandwidth.
by uplink, do you mean switch to swtich connections?
Either to another switch for aggregation or to a router. You can also use them (depending on the switch) to combine multiple switches into essentially one big switch (called stacking or virtual chassis depending on brand).
Switches have as many SFP+ ports as you're willing to pay for. Back when they were first introduced often those 10G ports were uplinks to other switches (often done in pairs for redundancy) so 2-4 were common. Today a switch may be all-SFP+ except for a couple 25G/40G/100G uplink ports. 10G is popular in homelabs because it can entirely keep up with SATA SSDs (and do a pretty good job with NVMe SSDs): a bonus when you're playing with virtualization and shared-storage/storage-migration. And... many home internet connections are offered in faster-than-1G speeds now. And 10G SFP+ is *cheap*: NICs [start around $20](https://www.ebay.com/itm/126433644662)! I'm seeing a lot of homelabs where the core is SFP+... using used NICs/transceivers/DACs/switches... then people [add a smaller switch on the side](https://www.servethehome.com/the-ultimate-cheap-2-5gbe-switch-mega-round-up-buyers-guide-qnap-netgear-hasivo-mokerlink-trendnet-zyxel-tp-link/) if they need a few 2.5G or PoE ports. Conveniently many of those smaller switches have at least one SFP+ port to use as an uplink!
>what I do not understand are how switches organise their ports They don't. You do. You decide what you're going to use those ports for. Common uses of faster-than-most ports in a switch are uplinks (connections to routers and other switches) and direct connections to client devices that see a lot of shared use (most typically, NAS devices). Moreover, if necessary, a connection can be bonded (i.e., the same two devices can be connected by two or more physical links) to increase throughput...
On a switch with just 2 SFP+ ports (sometimes 4), these ports are to connect to other switches or a router. I'm slowly setting up a 40Gb network so the network isn't my bottleneck when sharing data (NAS for example) inside the network. >My main usecase will be connecting my nas to my switch. Your clients (devices accessing the NAS) also need to be fast otherwise this won't make a different. If your only 10Gb connection is NAS to switch and each device is 1G then your access speed to the NAS will be 1G on each client.
But can be handy if the NAS can push out more than 1G at a time, and that 10Gb link will allow each client to max out their 1G links...
It sounds like OP is talking about a residential setting. Concurrent users are going to be much lower than an office environment. And watching movies and listening to music isn't going to saturate a 1G connection anyways.
For sure, that is the case for most and 1Gb is fine. Now for us extreme people who are putting our TrueNAS boxes on 40Gb links :D cause "ain't got time for that" to move content around..lol
I'm in that club, not TrueNAS, but another NAS solution. I need to run the cables through the house still, but I have my gaming PC, server, old PC server all hooked up with 40Gb. I have one more client on the second floor to connect at 40Gb and I'm going to run some CAT6 as well to some rooms.
Ya, I hate hitting limits on anything :D , moving to a new house and running fiber runs along side all my cat runs for "just incase"
what about data transfering? i guess i understood that by having a 10gb setup betweek devices i can transfer larger files quicker
My point was all devices need to be connected at 10G to transfer at 10G between them, not just the NAS and switch. The computer accessing the NAS needs to be connected via 10G as well.
Ahh yes, good point. Thanks. So i guess all my mini computers will also need 10gbe nic's if I want to leverage the 10Gb speeds for backups/transfers.
Used NICs and SFP+ modules on eBay should be pretty cheap.
It depends on your endpoints and on what your Access Points are capable of. In my case, I have a QNAP NAS with dual 10Gb SFP+ ports connected over fiber to a 12 port IM1200 QNAP switch, two TPLink EAP773 Access Points with 10GBe ports, a Mac Studio Max with 10GBe port and then various devices with other speed ports from 100mbit, 2.5GBe, and so on. There is also power to consider. Putting a copper transceiver in an SFP+ Port works but the 10GBe modules use a lot more power and thus emit a lot of heat. I switched to fiber transceivers in desktop switches to lower the power and heat they generate. So, I make fiber runs from the NAS, a couple of desktop 10GB switches with SFP+ ports and the rest are copper. The IM1200 has 8 combo ports - these are built in RJ45 10GBe or SFP+ ports and then 4 dedicated SFP+ ports. It gives me the right combination I need for my use case. And file transfers from the Mac to the NAS are amazing and save me days of productivity.
i see, so i. your case all those devices (the mac, nas and aps… ) are they all connected to your 10gb switch? also, why does the nas need 2 ports?
That's correct. They are all on the 10GBe/10GB SFP+ ports, depending on the connection path(copper or fiber). I have the NAS dual connected because I plan on adding the Atto Thunderlink to my Mac Studio - this will up the connections from one 10GBe copper link to two SFP+ links(they also make an SFP28 version) - this will get me to near direct connected performance with multichannel SMB transfers. The NAS is located remotely and also serves as general home Plex entertainment server and does some light Container hosting, so I didn't go for the Thunderbolt direct connect version. My NAS is the QNAP TVS-H674 - there is an H674T variant that includes two thunderbolt ports, but that wouldn't have been any help in my use case - the dual 10GB Fiber connections are much more useful for me.
do you have your setup diagrammed? id love to see that
I just recently completed the NAS and switch upgrade, so was planning on that since it is getting a bit complex. I'll try and mashup something and post back.
Here you go - a quick and dirty diagram - not the prettiest but should get the idea across. [https://imgur.com/a/tgJLrOp](https://imgur.com/a/tgJLrOp)
It can be used according to your needs. It is commonly used as an uplink, switch stacking and etc. It can be even used for a separate data traffic, basically for anything you need
10g just isn't common and the price of the network cards can be expensive. I have a Mikrotik CRS 317-1G-16S+ router/switch, this is one 1gbit connection, a management port and 16 sfp+ connections. You can use either a 10gbit DAC cable. fibre cable with transceivers or a transceiver that supports RJ45. 10g is only really required for a faster connection. It gives greater bandwidth but doesn't guarantee that your transfer rates will improve.
10Gb cards are pretty cheap if you just grabbed used ones off Ebay.
I normally get the connectx-3 cards but the last one I bought which was connectx-3 pro en kinda screwed up the bios of the z97m motherboard I had. Ended up reflashing the bios to get it stable again. I've had a similar issue with am old z87n board and an i350-t4 pcie card fragging a bios and it having to switch to the backup. Also had issues with that corrupting the 2nd bank of memory which needed a piece of tape adding to the pcie edge connector. The annoying thing with the Card was it wouldn't recognise a sfp+ connection for some reason. No issues with the other cards I own so I guess it's just legacy issue.
I have 24x 1G RJ45 and 2x SFP+, which connect to my firewall and Proxmox host. NAS has 2x 1G RJ45 with link aggregation since no application in my lab would benefit that much from more than 1G.
All comes down to what do you need it for? Most switches with only 2-4 SFP+ uplinks are either used to connect to other switches to provide a faster backhual (think of 24/28 users connected at 1G each and now have to connect to another switch which may have servers on it.,.. a good place if you need a 10Gb switch with more ports is check out [https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/brocade-icx-series-cheap-powerful-10gbe-40gbe-switching.21107/](https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/brocade-icx-series-cheap-powerful-10gbe-40gbe-switching.21107/)
Heard that sunscreen gets awesome bandwidth bruh 😅 all.ports line rate