Question Tried 10Gb, sort of. My experience so far.

[In2Photos]

I've been thinking about a full network upgrade at home, redoing all my Ethernet runs back to a central location and putting in some Unifi gear. Based on the number of runs I planned in the house I need a main switch capable of 8-9 connections plus an uplink to the router (not including cameras which will connect to a different device). Preferably it would have some spare ports and it needs to provide PoE for the access points and to power some smaller switches where I don't want to run multiple cables for small bandwidth/infrequently used items. Several of the hard wired devices can do at least 2.5Gb, 1 can do 5Gb and the access points I'm looking at can do 10Gb. My server is still 1 Gb (all my existing networking gear is 1Gb) as is my work laptop's dock. The Unifi switches with PoE and at least 8 ports span from a desktop switch at $199 all the way to a 24 port switch at $999. Lumped in the middle is a 10 port switch with all ports 10Gb PoE at $699. This would allow me to "future proof" my network for a while as I doubt I would need anything faster than that. I don't really "need" 10Gb anyway although it would be nice for those large video file transfers after a day of recording my son's baseball games.

So I thought maybe it would be a good time to look at upgrading as much to 10Gb as possible. Let's see what it would take.

1. Upgrading my unRAID server to 10Gb is pretty easy, several $50 PCIe cards on Amazon. But would it benefit from the faster card? Transferring files to the server is limited by the cache drive(s) which at the moment is a 500GB SATA SSD. So it could handle ~500MB/s or just a little over 4Gbps. If I put in an NVME I could likely saturate the 10Gb card. Not sure it's worth a 5Gb PCIe card and frankly didn't look for one. Transferring files FROM the server though is going to be limited by the spinning drives since I don't store anything on the cache drive.
2. The work laptop would need a Thunderbolt adapter. Most of the reviews online show the 10Gb units run hot though. That left me looking at 5Gb USB-C units and I picked one up for $35.
3. My gaming PC is 2.5Gb, but I have a vertical GPU and no room for a PCIe card without some funky riser or something so a USB adapter is all I could use. No thunderbolt either on my motherboard so I picked up the same 5Gb USB-C adapter as the laptop.
4. A switch in my office that could connect all this up until I so the full network upgrade. I found a trendnet 6 port switch, 4-2.5Gb and 2-10Gb ports. Good enough to test for now and dip my toes in before going all in. $85 on sale.

The stuff arrived and I got to work. Installing the PCIe card in the server was easy and configuring the port in UnRAID was painless. A couple of clicks and the cable plugged into the new card and one of the 10Gb ports on the switch and the server dashboard showed me at 10Gb! Woohoo! I connected 1 of the USB-C 5Gb adapters into my work laptop's dock and into the second 10Gb port on the switch. Fired it up and boom, 5Gb shown in Windows! Woohoo! Now to test! I launched Open Speed Test on the server and ran the test, pushing close to 5Gb one way and just over 4Gb the other way. Tested a transfer of a ~30GB outlook PST file and it flew! Averaged around 500MB/s for the transfer! Previous setup was limited to about 110MB/s so almost 5 times faster. Awesome!

I spent the next few hours working as normal and then took a break for lunch. When I came back my laptop had switched to a wireless connection! Huh! That's weird. Started troubleshooting. No light on the port on the new switch for the laptop. Checked cables, everything was good (bought all new CAT6 patch cables for this too), tried the other USB-C adapter since I hadn't used it on the gaming PC yet. No change. Finally decided to switch to the other 10Gb port on the switch and got a link. Plugged the server into the 2nd 10Gb switch. Nothing! The port seems to have failed or perhaps it dropped out due to heat, the switch was warm to the touch, but not overly hot. So I plugged the laptop into 1 of the 2.5Gb ports and left the server in the 10Gb working port. What a bummer!

So now I'm looking for different switches, but this may only be a temp setup so I don't want to spend a bunch on something I may not use later. Unifi has a 5 port switch with 4-10Gb and 1-1Gb but it's $299 and I don't know that I would get much out of it once the full setup is in. I planned to use their 5 port 2.5Gb switch in my living room so I picked that up to use temporarily. I installed it and immediately realized that the PCIe card won't do 2.5Gb (or 5Gb), only 10Gb or 1Gb (and 100Mb). So that was frustrating. I'm basically back to gigabit speeds after spending $150 and a few hours of time, lol. I didn't even get to test the 10Gb part enough to see if it would be worth the extra money over say 2.5Gb (although I know now that I would need a different PCie card or at least one 10Gb port on the switch for the server).

So what have your 10Gb experiences been like? Did it go flawlessly or were there issues?

 

[Micrornd]

My workstation and server use the Marvell AQtion AQC113 chipset and the Wife's PC and the Plex Server use the NICGIGA NIC-10G add-in LAN cards ($60+), that also uses the Marvell AQtion AQC113 chipset.
A NICGIGA S100-0800T 8 Port unmanaged switch ($250+, it does not do POE) connects it all together and also connects to one of the 10Gb ports on my router. The Marvell AQtion AQC113 chipset connects at 10Gb, 5Gb, 2.5Gb, 1Gb or 100Mb (I picked that because, as you've seen, some chipsets don't connect at all speeds).
I felt it was best to use the same brand and chipsets as much as was possible.
This replaced my 1Gb network over a year ago and has been absolutely trouble free.

I am able to saturate the network and transfer @ 1.09 - 1.12 GB/s when transferring from my workstation to the server or vice versa. (Their media can supposedly transfer at up to 4GB/s and 2.6GB/s according to testing, I'd have to move to a 40Gb network to actually verify that)
Of course, not all transfers are always that fast, it depends of course on the compression used, size of, and type of files, but it shows that it is capable of maxing out the 10Gb net and that the net can achieve full bandwidth.
Bear in mind when you transfer rate test, you may be limited by the storage media you are transferring to, from or both.

I use RAID 10 boot/app media 2Tb, RAID 5 temp/scratch/junk storage 12Tb (w/single hot spare), RAID 6 working/daily use 48Tb (with single hot spare) and RAID 6 Plex Server 360Tb (2 x 180Tb with 2 hot spares each).
Everything is in conduit so that I can upgrade or move to fiber, cabling is currently all Cat 6 and the runs to the switch are 40', 35', and 2 x 30', after that everything else is distributed by my Wi-Fi router (Tp-Link AXE 16000 Archer AXE300)
Hope that helps

 

[Shmee]

My experience with Multi GbE has been pretty good. Only thing is my first 10Gb NIC, a used Intel X540, I think was getting too hot and disconnecting during long transfers. So I took the Marvell AQtion NIC out of my desktop and replaced the Intel NIC in my NAS with it, and put another Marvell AQtion based NIC in my desktop. I think one is QFly brand and one is Asus brand.

 

[bba-tcg]

So far, I've been (mostly) satisfied with 2.5 Gb. I have a few devices / appliances that could do 10 Gb if I was willing to invest the time and money, but I'm always short on both.

 

[In2Photos]

My experience with Multi GbE has been pretty good. Only thing is my first 10Gb NIC, a used Intel X540, I think was getting too hot and disconnecting during long transfers. So I took the Marvell AQtion NIC out of my desktop and replaced the Intel NIC in my NAS with it, and put another Marvell AQtion based NIC in my desktop. I think one is QFly brand and one is Asus brand.

I went with an X540 because it was recommended for unRAID as plug and play with the most compatibility. I also liked that it has dual 10Gb ports, not that I need them, but in the future it may come in handy. I did read a lot of good things about the Marvell stuff as well. Unfortunately I won't really get to stress test the X540 before the return window is up so hopefully it pans out.

I just noticed that the QFly card seems to run at x4 instead of x8 like the X540 card I got. That would free up my x16 slot for something else down the road. I might give this a shot and see how it works, especially since it will do 2.5 and 5Gb as well.

 

[In2Photos]

My experience with Multi GbE has been pretty good. Only thing is my first 10Gb NIC, a used Intel X540, I think was getting too hot and disconnecting during long transfers. So I took the Marvell AQtion NIC out of my desktop and replaced the Intel NIC in my NAS with it, and put another Marvell AQtion based NIC in my desktop. I think one is QFly brand and one is Asus brand.

Got he QFly card this past weekend and got it installed. It took a bit to get reconnected to the server for some reason through the web GUI, but it did work. Looking back I think it might have been best to tell unRAID to use the built in NIC before changing the cards, then switch to the new card after swapping them. Thankfully it came up on its own. I'm currently connected at 2.5Gb to the new switch and am ready for 10Gb when I upgrade the rest of the network. Thanks for the card recommendation.