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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

A normal network runs at 10Gbps or 1.25GiB/s.

200MiB/s is too slow by a factor of 7. Though obviously some people have optimised it.

According to https://www.speedtest.net/global-index, 200MiB/s is over five times faster than Singapore's broadband speed – and that's the country with the fastest broadband in the world.

200Mbps puts you in the top 15 countries by broadband speed (above Japan) and the top 4 by mobile speed (above South Korea). Not that that's relevant to anything. (I haven't edited out any mistakes. The child comment is lying.)

You're conflating MiB/s with Mbps. Though I believe the GP was actually talking about local server networks, not internet speeds.

If you need to stream sequential floating point data out an internet link something more space efficient (and probably chunked instead) would probably be worthwhile over the simplicity.

I'd expect an actually optimized implementation to be at least that much faster.

Uh no? Most not-corporate networks are gigabit to 2.5gbit at best. Higher end home users may be doing 5gbit and 10gbit+.

Even top end wifi tends to only be around 1.2gbit.

Higher end home users are doing 25, 50 and 100 Gbps. Hardware is actually rather affordable now.

Although there's just not enough PCIe bandwidth in current consumer hardware for 100 Gbps...

Your high end is like the top 0.0001% of home users.

You can get to this under $1k nowadays. This Mikrotik switch changed everything: https://mikrotik.com/product/crs504_4xq_in

You can buy second hand 100g networking cards pretty cheaply. The caveat is that they only support older PCIe standards, so you need PCIe 16x to use them at full speed.

Please also don't forget typical NVMe drives are pretty fast now. Just two of them can nearly saturate a 100g link.

Personally I know a lot of people in IT field who have single mode fiber SFP28 networks. I'd say 0.001% - 0.01% is closer to reality.

Remember we were talking about high end.

Like 99% of the people I know who work in IT don’t have anything near what you’re mentioning. They spend $100 on all their networking equipment, not just a switch. They’re not laying fiber in their house. And outside of that group the number is basically 0.

I guess typical gateway drug is to get a 10g internet connection or 10g NAS at home and find out copper based cat6/7 is a lousy solution to actually make use of it.

Surprisingly high latencies (compared to fiber, that is) and noisy fans due to a lot of heat generated.

Shrug. I guess your mileage may vary.

I say this because I am almost at this point (I run copper through my house) but was scared off on going full fiber. I know some who have, but it’s definitely really, really rare.

I had (well, still have) cat 7 in the house, while venturing into fiber as well. 10GBASE-T switches are noisy and surprisingly power hungry.

One big reason for fiber is a home lab. Transferring large VM images etc. is so much faster. Ability to run iSCSI fast is also amazing.

Single mode fiber is pretty nice. It's fast, has low power requirements and no need to worry about electrical issues. Prices have declined significantly. The only minus is that you can't have PoE, so the best option is to wire both.

(Ok, there's actually Power over Fiber, but that's just crazy stuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-over-fiber. A huge fire risk.)

It's hard for me to picture doing something with an internet/NAS connection and caring about the extra percents of a millisecond copper gives you. And all the 10g cards amazon is showing me are fanless. Even if you need a fan, it should be enough at whisper-quiet speeds.

How many homes have fibre runs everywhere. Most homes don't even have cat-5

Yeah but that is the extreme minority. Claiming it isnt is absurd.

x86 motherboards usually come with a 10Gbps onboard NIC.

It's the standard. I don't know what kind of world you live in to convince yourself it's exclusive.

100Gbps is also available pretty cheap, but typically only as a separate card.

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