I really really want to see this (with a embedded 10G NIC) in a new generation of NASes. It's embarrassing how much that space has stagnated in the prosumer space, and this looks like a nice replacement for the celery or atom processors.
For AMD's NAD offering ( or applicable to NAS ) it should be their Embedded Line [1] which offers 10G.
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpo...
The processors from Synology and Qnap have stagnated. How much more would it really cost to add to the computing power?
I'd image an issue is price point and how to market these devices. SMBs were the target in the past, but with more infrastructure and more moving to cloud hosted solutions, that market may be drying up.
My problem is I want to spend dollar on NAS with 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps or even 10Gbps Ethernet. But the whole ecosystem of NBase-T or 10Gbps Ethernet is ridiculously expensive. From Switches to Router.
There are just something I dont want it to live on the cloud and prefer to stay within in my own premises. But the whole Industry has far too many interest in sucking us all into the cloud.
There are options for 10G to fit every need but none will come cheap.
At least for a home power user serving NAS to a few high speed clients, that $150ish switch is sufficient, but if not then MikroTik makes larger switches with more ports.
Obviously if you are an HN reader you fall under the <5% :). If you have the need and are a power user there are options. The best one right now being the second hand market. I was eying a couple of Intel X540-T2 (~60-80E on eBay) or Mellanox ConnectX-2 (under 50E), not yet decided on the switch.
But realistically speaking, most people don't want to pay even 10E for any of this. They don't transfer bulk data or not over cable so they don't care about DIYing their network, especially once they realize everything is more expensive (cards, switches, NAS, maybe even cables).
2.5G and up has to go into ISP routers for it to really take off and become cheaper. And even then most users will still want better WiFi and not care about cables (and still most don't go for a decent AP and use the ISP router WiFi.
But for the manufacturers and ISPs I imagine at that large scale the relatively small cost savings add up. And why waste a good opportunity to sell an intermediary tech. They'll be able to sell 5G/10G in a few years.
I agree, most people care more about stable WiFi, but for the prosumer home lab - 10Gb has been low cost all around for a few years already.
Really the killer right now is 10Gb over twisted pair is a power sucking beast; and people are (rightly) not wanting to abandon the familiarity, ubiquity and ease of installation granted by it. More PC motherboards and assembled systems are shipping with 10Gb NIC’s, we’re just waiting on switching to be affordable and fairly quiet before it can take off.
I would love 10 Gbps connections, but I don't think they're right around the corner.
Though I do have to admire the conviction with which some of my co-techies believe what they are describing is a generally applicable situation anywhere beyond the limits of places like HN. And I am saying this as someone who has over 1000 CPU cores and over 2TB of RAM in my home lab for some years now. I'm realistic enough to accept that this isn't a reasonable expectation even from other techies, let alone for a regular consumer.
To be clear, most of the stuff I didn't buy because I need it but because I wanted to play and experiment with it. I test and play with everything I can imagine, time permitting. Then I sell most of it before it loses the resell value and top it up a bit to buy the next "big thing".
But if I told even most of my fellow HNers that "they're cheap" and "everyone should have this" they'd think I fell on my head one too many times. :)
Ssshh. If too many people find out buying fairly modern hardware on eBay is affordable and easy it will stop being so :)
Seriously though, in the US there’s been a recent flood of 12th gen Dell servers hitting the market with Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips in them. Sure, it’s not gonna perform as well as newer systems, but at $200-300 with power usage that even somebody in California can stomach (a fairly well specced system can consume around 100W at idle/low load) - homelabs are fun and not outrageously expensive hobbies for those that want in.
It holds mostly telecom/network gear, but also has a simple NAS of some sort that he uses for backups (not sure what it is).
Also, most people with $1MM homes with integrated media systems piping through their house have a rack with telecom/network/media. A friend of mine has one in a house built 4 years ago.
So yeah, clearly this is a small minority, but still a bigger population than you might expect. And for reference, only one of the houses that I mentioned was over a million dollars. The other is about half than. And neither are geeks (one is a doctor, the other a retired manager).
Excluding people who work(ed) in the field, and have money and time to spare I have seen exactly 0 people who have a home lab and racks of high-end IT equipment.
Also "PoE" uses more power because it's actually powering a separate device entirely, that's not related to the 10G IC power consumption.
As for power - a typical optical 10Gb-SR will be power draw listed at 1W (PHY would draw less). It would appear to me that the power aspect is a moot point.
Let's be honest, you don't buy things because they're cheaper than they used to be. You look at what you need and compare with what you have to see if the "extras" justify the purchase. I bought two used 40G cards and one used 48x10G(RJ45) + 4x40G(QSFP+) switch for ~1300E. Which is a lot less than I would have paid just a few years ago. Still 2 orders of magnitude above what most people care to pay for home use. And I'm sure this hasn't convinced you to upgrade.
Regular consumers, with no particular technical inclination or passion for specialized tech probably outnumber enthusiasts 100:1. For them not having fancy features to worry about is the feature. Sure, gimme a super fast connection, who knows when I need it. But make sure it doesn't cost more or require more effort in maintaining than what I have now.
> But for anyone who wants or needs to move large files or data at home
I guess this is the crux of the matter. Not many do in a world of mobile and streaming. Just think of how many systems are still sold every day with drives that have no chance of being close to saturating such a pipe.
I agree with your reasoning to go for it because I used the same one (only I went further because if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing). But the market does not agree, demand is still quite low since the extras don't justify the purchase for all but the early adopters who slowly drag the price down. Until I see a 10G port in a mainstream ISP router, the "revolution" will only happen in techie households.
Most of the power concerns are related to 10GBASE-T, and it may only be few watts difference, but that could make a difference for mobile devices, and there is also cost per transceiver. Again practically no laptop or consumer motherboard is coming with an SFP port, and 10GBASE-T IC could be 10x the cost of a 1000BASE-T. 2.5GBASE-T is starting to show up on some consumer-level devices though.
This was the first non-ad link I found on Google when searching for "10G switch":
https://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Ethernet-Unmanaged-Rackmount-...
$349
Not dirt cheap, but less than I had thought. YMMV on "cheap" or "dirt-cheap", so just sharing for a more robust conversation.
It's a matter of perspective. These are only a concern for a narrow niche. Outside of your/our tech bubble people don't think the same way, and don't care about this. You know what is cheaper than everything that you mentioned there? The "free" ISP router and not building a home lab because they don't need it. They don't have 10G, racks, and home labs for the same reason you don't have 40/100/200G and an actual data center. Or anything that's so much outside of your field and passion that you can't even imagine it.
I have friends that think 6000E is the least they can pay to get a decent bicycle.
eventually.
This 4 port Mirotik product is a good first start: https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in
The problem with 10G is that the datacenter/nerds are still pushing sfp/fibre. Which completely misunderstands how people actually use 1G today. These 10GbaseT switches are literally drop in replacements for existing switches, and as the need arises cables can be upgraded. Which it turns out for home use, properly terminated cat5e works just fine at 10Gbit.
Anything can be "cheap" arbitrarily. Just a few comments above other people insist 10G/40G switches and setups are "cheap". But there's a reason people don't flock to buy these for home. Most don't feel they need them enough to justify the extra cost and effort of buying. You can be sure that tech preferences of HN people are as far from generally applicable as it gets.
So linux inefficiencies are a big problem here too.
Personally I prefer NFS at home, but what I really really want is a NAS that doesn't cost four digit sums and can do full-disk encryption on RAID basis without the performance tanking. iSCSI with OS X clients sucks.
BTW, I checked Xeon D motherboards and got scared with the prices.
My home server pegs my I/O when I run some tests to push a ton of bytes through Kafka, Postgres, Rook, etc. on top of a ZFS zpool. I do K8S at home along with some deep learning + big data-y toy projects because it's still cheaper than firing the equivalent up in any cloud provider after about 6 months of operation for myself, and at least I can repurpose my toys.
Step aside, Xeon D. This is a job for EPYC. Or POWER9.
That being said - totally agree. There are much better base platforms that have been out for a while of which NAS providers seem to ignore. Synology seems to have gotten really good at charging a premium for underwhelming system specs. I realize some people just want redundant network storage, however given the price points one would expect the ability to run a few additional services, containers, VMs, etc on those platforms.