I have been sitting here over the last couple of days really thinking about the idea of doing a upgrade on my network to move towards running something faster than 1gb networking on my machines.
The thing is that 1gb is actually fine for what I’m running on my local network right now for the most part. Occasionally when moving large pools of files around something faster would be a nice to have but generally speaking nothing that I’m doing requires anything faster. This puts a network upgrade solidly into the nice to have side of things.
In either case none of my devices have 10gb interfaces so the first thing that I have to look at is some cards for the desktop machines in the house. I’d be looking at cards for my Proxmox Server, both of my Storage Servers, an Application Server that’s sitting on my desk, as well as potentially my main computer.
Looking at it there’s lots of options out there with the stuff being pulled from servers but almost all of them are a 4x PCIe card and some of my devices only have 1x ports left. In either case I’m looking at about 400$ CAD for the cards that I need to get things all connected up.
Switch is another thing. Regardless of the brand I’m looking at at least a six port switch, five ports for the devices that I want to be running at 10gb and one for uplink to the rest of the network, assuming that I’m not wanting any more expansion for other devices that need to be running at a faster pace. Mikrotik and Ubiquiti both have options around the 400$ CAD mark that would work for what I’m looking at. The Mikrotik has an extra 1gb port that would work for uplink to the rest of the network, however if I wanted to double up with a trunk that port wouldn’t be something that gets leveraged anyhow.
Last thing that I’m looking at are cables. If I’m using SFP based cards then either I’m picking up transceivers and optical cables, or I’m looking at getting direct attached copper cables. The DAC cables seem to be the cheaper options, but I’m still looking between 25-30$ per cable, so another 200$ CAD in the pocket.
All in I’m looking at spending about 1000$ to get everything in place for this. So unless I come across some NIC cards or a switch for basically free, or I need to replace my existing network switch for some reason I’m probably going to have to sit on this one for a while.