11 ms·
It's interesting to see just how slow faster ethernet standards have been. Feels like I've had gigabit ethernet at a pretty low cost for nearly 20 years now, bu
by martinald 5y ago
It's interesting to see just how slow faster ethernet standards have been. Feels like I've had gigabit ethernet at a pretty low cost for nearly 20 years now, but faster than that has been pretty esoteric outside of the datacentre.
I guess there really isn't much demand for faster than gigabit speeds even now (outside of servers?)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- doublepg23 5y agoMaybe once gigabit internet service becomes more widely available, but even for something like a consumer NAS you’re probably bottlenecked by something else no?
- glogla 5y agoNAS with SSD can go way faster than the ~ 120 MB/s 1GbE can offer. For NAS with HDD, the benefit is not as big but still there. Also, the main competition is WiFi which is significantly slower than 1GbE in most cases.
- vladvasiliu 5y agoWell, seeing how large SSDs are still very expensive (in my mind it's €100 / TB), my hunch would be that if it makes sense for you to spend that much money on the drives, you probably won't really notice the price of a couple of 10 Gb network cards. They seem quite cheap on eBay if you're OK with used.
- k8sToGo 5y agoIt is not the cards that are that expensive. It is also the switches etc. Also SSD are not 100 EUR / TB. A 4 TB SSD is like 300 EUR.
- ericd 5y agoThe Mikrotiks are pretty reasonably priced (though you need adapters to go to RJ45, and you can only populate every other port due to heat). But you're right, the low end of switches are generally 10-20x more expensive IME.
- fulafel 5y agoSpinning HDDs are faster than this as well, 250-300 MB/s sequential read seems common per drive, and in a home setup you might have a couple of those in a RAID-1 giving 500-600 MB/s read BW.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago> couple of those in a RAID-1 giving 500-600 MB/s If you are talking about only two drives than no. Multiple drives can give you more throughput, but at that point it is RAID-10.
- fulafel 5y agoRight, for 2x single stream sequential read throughput + redundancy I guess you need somehing like Linux f2 RAID10 mode. Otherwise reading every other stripe per disk would kill you due to seeks or 50% wasted readahead.
- 64bittechie 5y agoNAS with HDD and a boat load of RAM can easily saturate 10GbE NIC if you're using it as a media server. Most content on my NAS is cached and rarely touches the disk.
- doublepg23 5y agoI’m curious how your media content is being cached? Running a PLEX server very rarely would I get ZFS ARC hits even when a blockbuster came out.
- vidarh 5y agoHaving a NAS is a niche thing. People who notice mine in the corner mostly don't even know what it is.
- k8sToGo 5y agoI have gigabit fiber Internet and internally I use 2.5Gbit
- adwn 5y agoMy hunch is that for most consumers, there's just no point in getting anything above 1 GbE today, even for their central switch. 1 Gbit/s is more than enough for 5x 4K video streams from their NAS, plus a very fast Internet connection at burst speed. What more do most people need on a regular basis?
- pkulak 5y agoWorking with files on a network share? Though, I do all my photo editing that way and it feels local over 1gbe. I could see video editing benefiting from it. Pretty niche though.
- rocqua 5y agoI checked performance on my server locally vs accessing the server as a NAS. The simple spinning hard-drive was already faster than gigabit ethernet, and the NAS access speed was 90-95% of ethernet. So I am prerty sure that NAS is the bottleneck here. And this is on a WD-red 5400RPM harddrive, nothing special.
- vardump 5y agoGetting stuck to 1 Gbps is somewhat crazy, as even the slowest laptop and PC M.2 SSDs can do 10-20 Gbps easy. Fastest ones 50 Gbps+. But I guess most people don't transfer files in their local networks anymore and use their network purely for internet access.
- ThePadawan 5y agoI rent an apartment in a building that was erected around 2015. They laid an ethernet connection... with a 100Mbps bandwidth limit. Some people just don't care.
- tblt 5y agoThey may have done this to run a single cable to supply both data and telephony/door intercom etc on the other pairs. I agree it's not ideal.
- sjagoe 5y agoAre the ports in pairs at each location? Then it sounds like they did a Very Bad Thing and ran one cable per pair of ports; 100Mbps uses two pairs, so why use two cables when one cable has four pairs, right? :( I've seen that a lot in much older installations, but I'd expect better from 2015 construction. I'm busy retrofitting Ethernet in my house by pulling cat6 through the walls and pulling out the old cat3 phone cabling. It's much harder work doing two cables (not least because none of the phone cables were in conduit, so it just starts off harder already) for each pair of ports, but it's very much worth the effort.
- ThePadawan 5y agoI phrased this intentionally vaguely, because the details are more complicated, but also don't matter. They didn't care, they just laid some sort of cable because that's all they had to.
- social_quotient 5y agoCurious why did you go with cat 6 and not 6a or 7? Thinking about doing similar but want to make sure I’m not missing something.
- cosmotic 5y agoFrom my perspective the problem is availability and cost of 2.5, 5, and 10gbe switches.
- AnthonyMouse 5y agoIt's kind of chicken and egg. It's not worth buying a 10G switch when all or nearly all of your devices are gigabit and it's not worth buying 10G cards for any device when you have a gigabit switch. What you need for the transition is for premium brands to start pushing 10G ports as a feature, e.g. Apple needs to add it to Macbooks and the Mini and start using it to bludgeon competitors who don't have it. Then once their customers have several 10G devices around, they buy a 10G switch and start demanding that every new device have it. At which point the volume gets high enough for the price to come down.
- eatbitseveryday 5y ago> for premium brands to start pushing 10G ports as a feature, e.g. Apple needs to add it to Macbooks and the Mini https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/ https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/ > Gigabit Ethernet port (configurable to 10Gb Ethernet)
- dtech 5y agoI've noticed 2.5 becoming a bit more common on enthusiast hardware, so it'll be a while yet before 10G becomes mainstream, but 2.5 and 5 might be the standard for new hardware a decade from now.
- Jaruzel 5y agoThe nice thing about 2.5gb/s is that you can still use existing CAT5e/6 cable runs (albeit at shorter distances). I really want to start seeing 2.5gb/s becoming standard on Desktop motherboards asap.
- tomohawk 5y ago2.5 and 5 can use existing cat5e or better cabling. There is no solution for 10GigE that uses that cabling.
- jabl 5y ago10Gbase-T does 55m with Cat6, or the full 100m with Cat6A, both of which are ubiquitous and cheap. It's probably more to do with the expense and power consumption of 10Gbase-T PHY's.
- fulafel 5y agoPeople have been using faster ethernet in workstations for a long time, in data intensive jobs. But indeed the commodization has been going much slower than previous gens. My pet theory is that it goes back to the stall in internet connecitivity speeds, which in turn is caused by people jumping en masse to slow and flaky wifi and cellular connectivity. This then causes popular apps to adapt aggressively to low bandwidth and keeps apps requiring high bandwidth out of the mainstream.
- ezconnect 5y agoBecause consumer found wifi more convenient and serves them well.
- walrus01 5y ago10GbE and 100GbE on fiber is quite cheap and easy now - but 99% of consumers and people doing ordinary stuff have no capability or interest in doing fiber. You can terminate cat5e or cat6 with $25 in hand tools... I think what's new is the prevalence now of 2.5 and 5GBaseT ethernet chips that are cheap enough companies are starting to build them into any $125+ ATX motherboard. At short lengths even old crappy cat5e has a good chance of working at 2.5 or 5.0 speeds.
- yrro 5y ago2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T are designed to work across 100 meters of Cat 5e. Nothing crappy about it! :)
- yrro 5y agoThat said... https://www.cablinginstall.com/sponsored/berk-tek/article/16482585/the-hidden-costs-of-running-25-5gbaset-over-cat-5e-cat-6-cabling https://www.cablinginstall.com/sponsored/berk-tek/article/16... ... points out that 5GBASE-T needs 200 MHz channel bandwidth which is past what Cat 5e is specified for. So perhaps for runs approaching 100 meters or in noisy environments, Cat 5e won't be reliable for 5GBASE-T after all.
- gjulianm 5y agoEven 100GbE is hardly seen on company datacenters. Yes, it's cheaper than before, but still more expensive than 10G, and that's extra cost multiplied by all the devices that need to have the improved hardware to take advantage. Plus, most servers won't saturate a 10G link without tweaks on the setup. For 100G it's even worse, I think it will take a long time to see them on datacenters outside of core links or for companies with heavy bandwidth use (storage, video).
- bradfa 5y agoI think the common knowledge that most servers can't saturate a 10Gb Ethernet link is no longer true. In my experience even saturating 25Gb links is rather easy to do when using 9000 byte MTU on mid-tier server hardware. 100Gb links do take some thought and work to saturate, but that's improving at a good rate lately so I expect it'll become more common rather soon. The main downside to 25Gb and 100Gb links still seems to be hardware pricing. At these speeds, PCIe network adapters and switches get rather expensive rather quick and will make you really evaluate if your situation really demands those speeds. 10Gb SFP+ and copper network adapters and switches are quite inexpensive now in 2022.
- buro9 5y agoLots of reasons: 1. Consumer broadband speeds rarely exceed 1Gbps 2. 1Gbps Local network transfers are seldom slowed by the network (as large file work typically involves HDD still) 3. Where local network transfers are impeded by the network speed the transferring itself isn't a frequent enough and blocking thing that people feel they need to fix it... they just go make a cup of tea once or twice a day 4. There are a lot of old network devices and cables out there, some built into the fabric of buildings (wall network sockets and cable runs) 5. WiFi is very very convenient, so much so that 250Mbps is good enough for almost anything and most people would rather be wireless at that speed than wired at a much higher speed (gamers and video professionals being an exception) And ultimately, the cost and effort of investing in it doesn't produce an overwhelming benefit to people. Even in quite large offices, it's hard to argue that this is worth it when the vast majority of people are just using web applications and very lossy audio and video meetings across the internet.
- AceJohnny2 5y agoAll excellent points but I'd remove gamers from there: > (gamers and video professionals being an exception) I play Stadia, 4K HDR 60FPS, just fine on a gigabit ethernet connection and 150MBit internet connection. Any games not streaming the entire video are fine with just kilobits/s of data, as long as the latency is good. So the case for home 10GE is even weaker ;)
- aequitas 5y agoYou probably even don't need gigabit. A Stadia stream ranges from 10Mbit to 50Mbit depending on the quality settings. Latency and other network users are far more influential on gameplay.
- xondono 5y agoI understood GPs point to be “everyone is pretty much on wifi except professionals and gamers anyway”.
- buro9 5y agoGamers aren't a strong answer :D but they're the audiophiles of home computing hardware and networks and the most likely to overspend in the belief that it's better :D
- panda88888 5y agoI have gigabit internet (downstream only... hoping for fiber one day for symmetric up/down), and I run wired gigabit ethernet for desktops and fixed devices to free up the wifi. For 99% everyday use it works just fine. Externally I hit 80+ MB/s on internet download (aggregate, very few sites saturate my downstream bandwidth), and internally I hit 90+ MB/s to and from my NAS. The only time I wish it was faster is when transferring really large files to/from the NAS, but only for 10GB+, so the extra cost of either SFP+ or copper 2.5/5/10G upgrade to the network is not really warranted. One day I might install a NVME cache on my NAS and run a straight 10G fiber from my workstation to the NAS, but that's more of a luxury (look I can transfer 10GB file in 10 sec instead of 100 sec!) than need.
- social_quotient 5y agoI’ve got google fiber 1 gig up and down. It’s plenty fast for external content but internally I’ve been annoyed at the network perf to my NAS so I got a secondary network card just to go from desktop to Nas at 10GbE speeds and it’s been great and it skips the need to overhaul the entire network stack.
- rocqua 5y agoDid that take any complicated setup to make the routing work?
- soneil 5y agoThese are naive takes, accounting only for linespeed and nothing more, but give a useful rule of thumb: - An 8x cdrom narrowly beats 10meg ethernet. - 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet. - ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet.
- sigstoat 5y ago> - 1x dvdrom narrowly beats 100meg ethernet. that doesn't fit with my recollection of reading/transferring DVDs, or with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_storage_media_writing_and_reading_speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_storage_media_writing_... > - ATA133 narrowly beats 1gbit ethernet. the electrical interface/protocol, sure. i don't think any ATA133 drive made could actually saturate its interface, or a gigabit link.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- DannyBee 5y agoThe main thing, i think, is that outside of DAC, most faster speeds are used over fiber. The cabling starts to become an issue otherwise. It's also hot and power hungry over copper. Having gotten into the home fiber side of it for various reasons, it's clear on the fiber side there is plenty of innovation/cost lowering/etc.
- jabl 5y agoI mostly agree, but optical transceivers are still expensive. Been waiting for dirt cheap silicon photonics for a couple of decades now. But it seems they are on track to be a thing, though initially for high-speed networking not home/office type stuff. Maybe one day, sigh.
- DannyBee 5y agoI'm not sure how you define expensive. https://www.fs.com/c/10g-sfp-plus-63 https://www.fs.com/c/10g-sfp-plus-63 20 bucks over MMF, 27 bucks over SMF doesn't seem expensive. If you want to do it over single fiber rather than duplex, it's 40 bucks: https://www.fs.com/c/bidi-sfp-plus-64 https://www.fs.com/c/bidi-sfp-plus-64 25Gbps is 39 bucks over MMF, 59 bucks over SMF. 40Gbps is also 39 bucks on MMF (more expensive on SMF) I don't think any of these are very expensive. The cards are also ~same price between SFP+ and 10GBaseT from places like startech (outside of that, the 10gbaset ones are actually often much more expensive)
- digisign 5y agoYep, though it isn't a problem I have any longer, using primarily wifi. Flash drive writing speeds are my biggest bottleneck, wish someone would tackle that at a reasonable cost.
- tgtweak 5y agoIt's not abysmal when you consider the standard (signaling, ECC) has to work over 80+km range in some cases. You'd be hard pressed to get a pci link to work over 10M. That being said, I generally agree that it has been moving too slow in consumer electronics and 2.5G is a pretty long overdue step-up for a moore-adjacent technology. Another factor is the humble reality that infrastructure (physical cables installed in walls) is the (s)lowest common denominator in this advancement.