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Comment by geraldhh | Hacker News Reader

> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard.

quick search turns up options for around 500euros

but don't be fooled, 10GbE copper is a power hungry mess. go with lower n-baseT speeds if just want some progression for the last twenty years of networking innovation or invest in optical and get a real upgrade (20/40/100 Gbps)

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What is the use case of 10Gb Ethernet for the regular PC user? Or even the enthusiast?

I have a sprawling homelab and home theater and scarcely need regular 1G. Last summer I transferred a media archive of ~10TB to new hardware, which completed overnight across Cat5. Is there some hot new hobby that generates multi gigabit bursts that I don't know about?

Uh, at maximum speed on a gigabit network, it takes 22 hours, 13 minutes to transfer 10 TB.

That’s not overnight unless you’re a hell of a sleeper.

On a 10Gig network, assuming no other bottlenecks (harder to do), it’s 2 and a quarter hours.

Personally, I use 10 gig because 100MB/s is really slow. Even 2.5Gb is much, much better and makes it a lot more likely something besides the network is the bottleneck.

I personally move around enough data, it bothers me enough to be worth it.

But what is that data? What super cool hobby do you have where you're regularly transferring 10TiB of data around?

Downloading Linux ISOs.

For me? I move around a lot more than 10TB.

Just my NVR archive is 70TB+, and that is with only a 3 month retention.

Throw in Photogrammetry data sets, decades of photos and videos, hundreds of thousands of PDF scans, and a ton more stuff, and, well. It’s a lot of data.

Editing video files. My kids are both into making videos and even though most of them are crap, I still want to get them into good habits of "store important files on the storage server" and we don't have any redundancy on local file storage. The difference between 1 and 10Gbps ethernet is noticeable there. (They only have 2.5Gbps to the desktop switch which has 10Gbps link to downstairs, so they only get ~250MB/s transfer, but they each have it simultaneously if they want.)

My only 10g link is between my main workstation and my nas. Between the SSD on my workstation and the 2 ssd array in the nas, I easily saturate 1g. Makes a big difference for video work and certain dev tasks (i.e. generating disk images). Granted I spent less than $100 for this capability using older solarflare cards and optics.

> spent less than $100 for this capability using older solarflare cards and optics

this is the way

Without 10 GbE (or at least 2.5 GbE) using any kind of NAS is a pretty significant performance downgrade over directly connecting hard drives (even using USB 3). GbE has been too slow for even a single hard drive for at least 15 years.

Perhaps having a 10Gbit internet connection and it is faster to download/upload things than 1Gbit? I'll never max it out, but it's $54/month instead of $44 for 1Gbit so why not. Why 1Gbit instead of 100Mbit?

AM5 w/ PCIE 5, DDR5 support and 10GBe? I've already eaten the cost, but I would love a link to the board you found. I saw a lot in that price range with 2.5 or 5GB but didn't run into any with 10GBe. That said I may have missed one. If nothing else it may be useful for when the wifes gaming rig gets an upgrade in a few months.

As to why I'm sticking with 10Gbe - I have a 24 port 10GBe switch for the house so going with the kit that matches the network I already have.

I got an older Supermicro off eBay with 6 10Gb ports for $89.

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