I also never thought I'd bother with 10GbE until I stumbled on some used Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards that were just cheap enough to play around with (~$30/card in

I also never thought I'd bother with 10GbE until I stumbled on some used Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards that were just cheap enough to play around with (~$30/card including DAC cables). Seeing file transfer speeds of >700MBps between my server and NAS convinced me it was worth keeping them installed, though initially just as a point-to-point link between those two systems.[1] A few months later, I was upgrading to a 24-port managed switch, and found one with four SPF+ ports (Aruba 1930) for little more than I could find a purely gigabit switch (~£180). I moved the 10Gbps NAS/server link to the main network, and added 10GbE to my main PC (with another ConnectX-3), and it's been a really nice system to use. A little overkill for most of my usage, but it's nice to have. I'm not convinced it's worth the cost of moving most of my other devices to 10GbE, even though I have a >1Gbps (down) Internet connection, as switches with more SPF+ ports or any 10G-BaseT ports (which some of my devices would require IIRC) seem rather expensive. Like you, I'm also open to suggestions if there's a cheap(ish) option I've overlooked. [1] Side note: I actually moved a USB drive from the server to the NAS as it had significantly faster (by about 30%) sustained read/write speeds that way. I'm presuming the NAS is caching the requests in memory, but both are on a UPS and it's only temporary working data anyway so I'm not too worried if the data doesn't actually hit the disc immediately.