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10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite e

10 GbE sits in a really weird spot for me, maybe I'm just not understanding something though. It's at most 1.25 GB/sec of bandwidth, yet it's relatively quite expensive. It's not sufficient bandwidth for getting good performance out of most SSDs, yet it's really excessive for any hard drives (except for RAID10 setups I guess). For SSDs you want thunderbolt (or 40+ GbE) connection for best latency and performance, and for hard drives 2.5Gbit/sec is more than enough. As I said, I might be misunderstanding something, but 10 GbE sits between the two sensible options for me.

whatevaa 6mo ago
Are you gonna run thunderbolt more than a few meters? If you think 10 is expensive, check prices above 10. You may even need fiber for that.
- nasretdinov 6mo ago
  No, of course I'm not going to if I choose thunderbolt :). But in many cases it's fine because SSDs aren't nearly as noisy as HDDs, so the NAS can just sit under your desk. For 40+ GbE or fibre I agree they are expensive, but at least you get full performance out of your system. SSDs aren't cheap these days either...
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  Making a long distance complex network may be expensive, but to connect directly a few computers one can use 25 Gb/s Ethernet at a reasonable price. Last time when I checked, dual-port 25 Gb/s NICs were not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs. If you have a few computers with no more than a few meters distance between them, you can put a dual-port 25 Gb/s card in each and connect them directly with direct attach copper cables, in a daisy chain or in a ring, without an expensive switch.
- butvacuum 6mo ago
  fiber vs DAC isn't really a cost concern st a home level. a 2m LC patch cable is $5 and used bidi cisco optics $5-10 each. not much more for new optics either.
razighter777 6mo ago
10gbe is a sweet spot at least for my homelab stuff. It's easy to find old enterprise gear for, cheap, and fast enough for everything I want to do.
- bombcar 6mo ago
  Exactly. Enough supports 10gbe that you might as well grab it; a few Mikrotik switches, some old enterprise gear, and an adapter gets you some good speeds. Sure some of it might have been fine at 2.5 or 5 but those are relatively new and less commonly available.
  - kotaKat 6mo ago
    I'm actually surprised at the amount of 2.5/5 gear I've been coming across lately, especially in the 2.5 space as more ISPs are pushing for gigabit+ to the house. Verizon's been issuing a wireless router with 10G WAN and several 2.5G ports and MoCA support that includes a 2.5G adapter and they use that across all their current connection types. I was delighted to see that when I got the router a couple years ago.
    - bombcar 6mo ago
      2.5 crossed some threshold and replaced 1gb I feel - which is nice. It’s a great “normal speed” vs 10g/40g for backbone and NAS.
- walrus01 6mo ago
  10GbE can be extremely cheap now if you're doing things like buying Intel NICs off eBay to put into your own test/dev headless servers. There is also a glut of 40 Gbps stuff on the market because it's a dead end technology and most ISPs went straight to 100 for things like aggregation switch to router links. Not that I would encourage anyone to go whole hog on 40 Gbps just because, but if you can get a transceiver for $15, NICs for $30, and maybe you get a switch for free from electronics recycling or for 80 bucks, and can tolerate its noise and heat output... I have seen plenty of people throw decommissioned 40 Gbps stuff straight into electronics recycling bins. Mellanox ConnectX-3 40 Gbps QSFP NICs are literally 20 bucks on ebay.
MisterTea 6mo ago
10 Gb is cheap! Mikrotik has a 4x10Gb + 1x1Gb port switch for $150 USD and an 8x10Gb version for about $275. I have the 8 port version. SFP+'s and fiber are cheap, like maybe 50 bucks for the SFP+ set and fiber. 10Gb PCIe cards are maybe ~$50 new on Amazon with Intel chips and cheaper on eBay - I bought used 10 Gb Mellanox cards for $25 each - "they just work" under FreeBSD and Linux. Copper 10 Gb used to consume waaaaay more power (like 5+W per port!) and cost more both in terms of the SFP and cable. In reality fiber is more environmentally friendly as there is no copper, less energy used, and less plastic per meter. So my setup mostly consists of SR and BR optics and DAC's. The "DAC" direct attach cables are handy for switch-switch or short switch<->NIC runs. And I will continue to run fiber for the foreseeable future and actively avoid copper.
- donatj 6mo ago
  I redid the backbone of my home in 10Gb fiber, and "cheap" is not the term I would use. Especially when you can get perfectly cromulent 1GbE switches for like $10 these days. The Mikrotik switches [1] work technically speaking but they are quite difficult to configure. You have to pull them from your network, connect physically to a specific port, force your machine onto a specific IP, connect to a specific IP. I could not get this to work in macOS nor Ubuntu despite hours of futzing with it. They both kept infuriatingly overriding my changes to the IP. I was only able to get this to work on an old Windows 10 laptop. Once you do get their web UI up, you pray the password on the sticker on the bottom works. Neither of mine did and I had to firmware reset both and find the default password online. The web UI itself holds no hands. It's straight out of 1995, largely unstyled HTML. While using both of my devices the backend the UI talked to would crash and log me out about every five minutes. Not every five minutes after log in. Every 5 minutes wall time! The Mikrotik switches are also fanless, and 10GbE SFP+ adapters throw off a lot of heat. If you use more than one they overheat. You can just about get away with two if you put them on opposite sides but I would not recommend it. I've also had very mixed luck with SFP+ module compatibility with this thing. I had a number of modules that refused to run at higher than one GB, hence my fighting to get into the UI. Despite a ton of futzing between logouts I was not able to get them to work at 10Gb and returned them. I'll be honest, my Mikrotik switches have been infuriating. I replaced one of them with a Ubiquiti Pro XG 8 8-Port 10G and holy crap the difference is night and day. It just works. Everything worked straight from the box day one, I can configure it from my phone or the web, I highly recommend this thing. The Ubiquiti switches are multiple times more expensive but if you value your time they're well worth the price. I still have two of the Mikrotik switches on my network but am completely intent on replacing them. The Ubiquiti is worth it for online configuration alone. No need to pull the thing from your network, test your changes immediately! 1. https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in 2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe
randusername 6mo ago
I chose 10GbE to fit 20 HDDs in RAID 10. ~ 1 GB/sec seems about right for a long time. I can't imagine the basic files I work with everyday getting much more storage-dense than they are in 2026.
- flemhans 6mo ago
  I remember my friend Peter, in 1999, on campus networking with 100 Mbit internet saying: I think this will be enough for many years to come. And he was kinda right — 100 Mbit is still "almost good enough" 27 years later for internet access.
- cyberax 6mo ago
  AI model files can be rather large...
CTDOCodebases 6mo ago
I have a zfs x 3 disk hard drive mirror and 10GbE. For writes yes 10GbE overkill but for for reads it's faster than 2.5GbE would be. Sure there is 5GbE but most switches that support 5GbE support 10GbE.
AdrianB1 6mo ago
10 GbE has a good performance/$ ratio, better than 25 GbE, and it is 10 times faster than the basic (for today) 1 Gbps. If you need more go for 25, but the availability of cheap cards, switches and cabling (DACs, AOCs, transceivers) is lower than for 10 GbE. For me, 10 GbE is the baseline for the year 2025 at home.

whatevaa 6mo ago

Are you gonna run thunderbolt more than a few meters? If you think 10 is expensive, check prices above 10. You may even need fiber for that.

nasretdinov 6mo ago
No, of course I'm not going to if I choose thunderbolt :). But in many cases it's fine because SSDs aren't nearly as noisy as HDDs, so the NAS can just sit under your desk. For 40+ GbE or fibre I agree they are expensive, but at least you get full performance out of your system. SSDs aren't cheap these days either...
adrian_b 6mo ago
Making a long distance complex network may be expensive, but to connect directly a few computers one can use 25 Gb/s Ethernet at a reasonable price. Last time when I checked, dual-port 25 Gb/s NICs were not much more expensive than dual-port 10 Gb/s NICs. If you have a few computers with no more than a few meters distance between them, you can put a dual-port 25 Gb/s card in each and connect them directly with direct attach copper cables, in a daisy chain or in a ring, without an expensive switch.
butvacuum 6mo ago
fiber vs DAC isn't really a cost concern st a home level. a 2m LC patch cable is $5 and used bidi cisco optics $5-10 each. not much more for new optics either.

razighter777 6mo ago

10gbe is a sweet spot at least for my homelab stuff. It's easy to find old enterprise gear for, cheap, and fast enough for everything I want to do.

bombcar 6mo ago
Exactly. Enough supports 10gbe that you might as well grab it; a few Mikrotik switches, some old enterprise gear, and an adapter gets you some good speeds. Sure some of it might have been fine at 2.5 or 5 but those are relatively new and less commonly available.
- kotaKat 6mo ago
  I'm actually surprised at the amount of 2.5/5 gear I've been coming across lately, especially in the 2.5 space as more ISPs are pushing for gigabit+ to the house. Verizon's been issuing a wireless router with 10G WAN and several 2.5G ports and MoCA support that includes a 2.5G adapter and they use that across all their current connection types. I was delighted to see that when I got the router a couple years ago.
  - bombcar 6mo ago
    2.5 crossed some threshold and replaced 1gb I feel - which is nice. It’s a great “normal speed” vs 10g/40g for backbone and NAS.
walrus01 6mo ago
10GbE can be extremely cheap now if you're doing things like buying Intel NICs off eBay to put into your own test/dev headless servers. There is also a glut of 40 Gbps stuff on the market because it's a dead end technology and most ISPs went straight to 100 for things like aggregation switch to router links. Not that I would encourage anyone to go whole hog on 40 Gbps just because, but if you can get a transceiver for $15, NICs for $30, and maybe you get a switch for free from electronics recycling or for 80 bucks, and can tolerate its noise and heat output... I have seen plenty of people throw decommissioned 40 Gbps stuff straight into electronics recycling bins. Mellanox ConnectX-3 40 Gbps QSFP NICs are literally 20 bucks on ebay.

MisterTea 6mo ago

10 Gb is cheap! Mikrotik has a 4x10Gb + 1x1Gb port switch for $150 USD and an 8x10Gb version for about $275. I have the 8 port version. SFP+'s and fiber are cheap, like maybe 50 bucks for the SFP+ set and fiber. 10Gb PCIe cards are maybe ~$50 new on Amazon with Intel chips and cheaper on eBay - I bought used 10 Gb Mellanox cards for $25 each - "they just work" under FreeBSD and Linux. Copper 10 Gb used to consume waaaaay more power (like 5+W per port!) and cost more both in terms of the SFP and cable. In reality fiber is more environmentally friendly as there is no copper, less energy used, and less plastic per meter. So my setup mostly consists of SR and BR optics and DAC's. The "DAC" direct attach cables are handy for switch-switch or short switch<->NIC runs. And I will continue to run fiber for the foreseeable future and actively avoid copper.

donatj 6mo ago
I redid the backbone of my home in 10Gb fiber, and "cheap" is not the term I would use. Especially when you can get perfectly cromulent 1GbE switches for like $10 these days. The Mikrotik switches [1] work technically speaking but they are quite difficult to configure. You have to pull them from your network, connect physically to a specific port, force your machine onto a specific IP, connect to a specific IP. I could not get this to work in macOS nor Ubuntu despite hours of futzing with it. They both kept infuriatingly overriding my changes to the IP. I was only able to get this to work on an old Windows 10 laptop. Once you do get their web UI up, you pray the password on the sticker on the bottom works. Neither of mine did and I had to firmware reset both and find the default password online. The web UI itself holds no hands. It's straight out of 1995, largely unstyled HTML. While using both of my devices the backend the UI talked to would crash and log me out about every five minutes. Not every five minutes after log in. Every 5 minutes wall time! The Mikrotik switches are also fanless, and 10GbE SFP+ adapters throw off a lot of heat. If you use more than one they overheat. You can just about get away with two if you put them on opposite sides but I would not recommend it. I've also had very mixed luck with SFP+ module compatibility with this thing. I had a number of modules that refused to run at higher than one GB, hence my fighting to get into the UI. Despite a ton of futzing between logouts I was not able to get them to work at 10Gb and returned them. I'll be honest, my Mikrotik switches have been infuriating. I replaced one of them with a Ubiquiti Pro XG 8 8-Port 10G and holy crap the difference is night and day. It just works. Everything worked straight from the box day one, I can configure it from my phone or the web, I highly recommend this thing. The Ubiquiti switches are multiple times more expensive but if you value your time they're well worth the price. I still have two of the Mikrotik switches on my network but am completely intent on replacing them. The Ubiquiti is worth it for online configuration alone. No need to pull the thing from your network, test your changes immediately! 1. https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in 2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe

randusername 6mo ago

I chose 10GbE to fit 20 HDDs in RAID 10. ~ 1 GB/sec seems about right for a long time. I can't imagine the basic files I work with everyday getting much more storage-dense than they are in 2026.

flemhans 6mo ago
I remember my friend Peter, in 1999, on campus networking with 100 Mbit internet saying: I think this will be enough for many years to come. And he was kinda right — 100 Mbit is still "almost good enough" 27 years later for internet access.
cyberax 6mo ago
AI model files can be rather large...

CTDOCodebases 6mo ago

I have a zfs x 3 disk hard drive mirror and 10GbE. For writes yes 10GbE overkill but for for reads it's faster than 2.5GbE would be. Sure there is 5GbE but most switches that support 5GbE support 10GbE.

AdrianB1 6mo ago

10 GbE has a good performance/$ ratio, better than 25 GbE, and it is 10 times faster than the basic (for today) 1 Gbps. If you need more go for 25, but the availability of cheap cards, switches and cabling (DACs, AOCs, transceivers) is lower than for 10 GbE. For me, 10 GbE is the baseline for the year 2025 at home.