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I work with a vast collection of unprocessed photographs, which takes up about 6 terabytes of storage space on my 4-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device -

I work with a vast collection of unprocessed photographs, which takes up about 6 terabytes of storage space on my 4-bay network-attached storage (NAS) device - a DS418. Despite being limited to 1 GbE speeds, the process of loading each of the raw images, which are around 60-70 MB in size, only takes half a second. I occasionally use the smb multichannel flag to improve my bandwidth when connecting to my Mac through two gigabit USB-C Ethernet adapters, but it doesn't make much of a difference. Editing over Wi-Fi using my Wi-Fi 6 connection, which usually runs at 700 Mbit/s, is also not an issue. Although having a 10 GbE connection would be nice, it is not a priority since the NAS hard drives' speed would become the limiting factor before reaching that level, and the cost of upgrading the hardware to support it is prohibitively expensive. Adding a solid-state drive (SSD) cache to my NAS could be beneficial, particularly when using a 10 GbE connection. Synology provides 10 GbE add-on cards for a small portion of their stations.

sokoloff 3y ago
Everyone’s prohibitive level is different, but 10GbE connectivity has come down a lot in the last 5 years and is (IMO) reasonable for home backbone and select machine connectivity for techies now. I went 10Gb for that and 2.5Gb to the kids’ desktops (with a 10Gb uplink) and I think the entire network setup was well under $1000 for 2 servers and 3 computers (1 10Gb, 2 2.5Gb). The switches and fiber link will be in service for 10 years in all likelihood, making it feel pretty reasonable to me.
AdrianB1 3y ago
For 10 Gbps equipment look at Mikrotik switches, a 4 port SFP+ one was around $130 when I bought it and the PCIe NICs were $50 a piece. I used DAC and AOC instead of UTP cables, they were $20-$50 each depending on the length, I paid for the whole thing a bit over $600 (6 SFP+ ports in total on 2 switches). I use TrueNAS and the cache works only for reads, it helps with navigation of the folder structure (tens of thousands of photos, for example), but not with writes and not with most reads. Some other solutions can do write caching on SSD, that may improve the performance over 10 Gbps network a lot, but for 1 Gbps cache is not that useful.

sokoloff 3y ago

Everyone’s prohibitive level is different, but 10GbE connectivity has come down a lot in the last 5 years and is (IMO) reasonable for home backbone and select machine connectivity for techies now. I went 10Gb for that and 2.5Gb to the kids’ desktops (with a 10Gb uplink) and I think the entire network setup was well under $1000 for 2 servers and 3 computers (1 10Gb, 2 2.5Gb). The switches and fiber link will be in service for 10 years in all likelihood, making it feel pretty reasonable to me.

AdrianB1 3y ago

For 10 Gbps equipment look at Mikrotik switches, a 4 port SFP+ one was around $130 when I bought it and the PCIe NICs were $50 a piece. I used DAC and AOC instead of UTP cables, they were $20-$50 each depending on the length, I paid for the whole thing a bit over $600 (6 SFP+ ports in total on 2 switches). I use TrueNAS and the cache works only for reads, it helps with navigation of the folder structure (tens of thousands of photos, for example), but not with writes and not with most reads. Some other solutions can do write caching on SSD, that may improve the performance over 10 Gbps network a lot, but for 1 Gbps cache is not that useful.