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Comment by nasretdinov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

10 Gb is cheap! … $150 … $275.

San Francisco checking in.

It's not that much considering people pay $100+ for cable/internet and/or >=$(15 * n) streaming services PER month. Some people might want faster transfer speeds or low latency. For the price of two or three months of internet and streaming/cable you get a very fast LAN if you so desire. If you don't need it then don't spend the money.

A single eero or Ubiquiti AP will be $150-300 depending on the exact capabilities, so if you're pricing out how to network your house I'd say the switch looks pretty good b

The UniFi U7 Lite is $99 and appears to be every bit as good as the more expensive gear unless you want 6GHz or need extra radios or have clients with more than two spatial streams.

10 years ago, you spent $40 for a few port unmanaged gigabit switch and $80-100 for the bottom tier web-managed crap.

That corresponds to $50 and $105-130 in today's money.

Now you can get it 10 times faster with an OK management layer for $150. This is after a -long- time of 10gbps prices stagnating.

10gbps is unexpectedly cheap.

minor nitpick: I wouldn't call it stagnating. They were artificially inflated.

as an aside: for pricing, 20 years ago unmanaged 1G-BaseT ethernet switches were $20/port. That's the region 10G-BaseT switches occupy right now if they use realtek chips. And multiple sources confirm the realtek switch can do full line rate on all ports simultaneiously with a normal 1500 MTU

Considering what you get and the historic prices of 10GbE those are absolute steals.

How much would they need to cost before you'd consider it cheap? If you want CHEAP then 10GbE is not for you in 2026.

Keep in mind that $275 today is the same as $140 in January 2000. Tech gadgets used to be far more expensive, both in real terms and as a percentage of average income.

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

2. https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/usw-pro-xg-8-poe

Hah. I used a dremel tool, some radiators, and a bit of thermal glue to make my Mikrotik switch work reliably: https://pics.ealex.net/share/UxeSf_AWHLIuc-qzK5zl7JIgQvQDAZh...

It's been like this for the last 3 years. And amazingly, I still can't find a 10G switch that is just as compact.

This is the kind of quality I want and expect from a website called Hacker News.

It's way more fun to see a real solution for a problem than it is to see someone complain that the cheapest available product is lacking in finesse.

Good stuff. Are you using RouterOS or SwOS on that little guy?

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Related, here's a moneyshot of my Mikrotik Hex S that I've got in a portable rack: https://i.postimg.cc/cCJhfkv1/image.png

That very cheap gigabit copper SFP was running hotter than I'd like -- it probably would have been fine, but this rig is meant to run outside while camping off-grid in the sun in central Florida. So I put some heatsinks from my 3D printing stash on there and so far they've stayed put.

In this system, the Hex S is running OpenWRT and is configured as a PoE-powered managed switch. In that role, it switches packets and does VLAN stuff fine, and is probably a bit of overkill.

But it's also one of several layers of manual redundancy, which is important in that environment: One does not simply go to the store and buy special electronics in central Florida. So it isn't included in the travel kit, then it doesn't exist.

With one shell script, it stops being just-a-switch and becomes a router with all the usual services, plus SQM tricks and multiple WAN ports. The rig works well.

RouterOS, although I'm only using the switch-related functionality.

I found that the temperature of the 10G modules has almost no relation to their cost. So far, the least hot modules are 10G Tek ones that are also the cheapest. Mirkotik's 10G modules are more expensive, and they are also hotter.

I use mikrotik equipment extensively (as in hundreds/ thousands of them over the years), while I disagree with a lot of of this, the post is absolutely correct about the ridiculous password on a sticker requirements they introduced a few years ago. The pw text is incredibly small and the way it’s printed (dpi and font) makes it very difficult to differentiate certain characters. Also the way you initially connect to them when they’re new out of the box to then enter this obnoxious password has several issues/challenges. It used to be so easy and convenient to configure brand new mikrotik devices in the past, and now it’s become a task I dread and has even caused us to buy non- mikrotik gear in several cases.

I don't configure anything on the mikrotik. Out of the box it's a dumb switch and that is all I want.

> The Mikrotik switches are also fanless, and 10GbE SFP+ adapters throw off a lot of heat.

If you are talking about copper SFP's, then that's the problem: copper. It takes a lot of energy to drive a wire at GHz speeds, not so much with an optical link (though it's getting much better.) I have only ever felt luke warm optical and DAC SFP's. Copper 10 Gb SFP's are burning hot. I avoid using copper and run fiber.

I got an 8 port SFP+ managed switch from AliExpress for $100!

Does microtik have any competition?

in the lower end space kind of, however in many respects no they don’t. Ubiquity would be their main competition, but ubiquity equipment is cloud first whereas a strong point of mikrotik has been that you do not need a centralized cloud controller (ie local first). Also in terms of the vast capabilities of mikrotik equipment at its price point, no there is absolutely no real competitor. (Maybe PFsense is the closest competitor with strong feature set)

Ubiquiti, Juniper, Firewalla or Alta Labs?

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.

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.

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.

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.

AI model files can be rather large...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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