In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
... but the prices of consumer network adaptors and switches supporting 10Gb/s remain inexplicably stubbornly high.
Ethernet standards wonks eye up speeds beyond 400Gb/s
The Ethernet Alliance has wrapped up its 2021 Technology Exploration Forum and revealed it’s heading off in pursuit of speeds beyond 400Gb/s. That acceleration is in the future, however, once a newly formed study group figures out what technologies need to be built to make it possible — and whether anyone will buy even faster …
-
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 08:05 GMT Steve K
Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
10Gb/s kit is not aimed at consumers really since to get anywhere close to saturating that requires a load of other expensive kit (e.g. SSDs/RAID) since the bottleneck is no longer the NIC(s).
There will always be enthusiasts wanting to get it running, but they aren't the target market either.
-
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 14:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
My Virgin internet runs at 1.2Gb. But I have a single port connection (no link aggregation on a superhub) so I can't actually use the speed offered. When a Sabrent 5-Gigabit Ethernet Adapter is 60 quid on Amazon, and Cat-7 is available, you just want to be able to plug it in. So having a step change is welcome.
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 15:36 GMT Steve K
Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
2.5Gbe is available and it's a lot cheaper than 5/10 Gbe too.
QNAP do a cheap 5-port 2.5Gbe switch and their newer NAS come with 2.5Gbe ports too.
2.5Gbe is closer to the max disk throughput from SSDs/RAID.
For example the SSDs from my VM host can now back up at 2.1 Gbps from NVME to SSD-tiered NAS volumes via the 2.5Gbe switch which is as fast as I am going to get.
-
-
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 11:13 GMT batfink
Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
Agreed, but what would you actually save by going to 10Gbps?
I have a NAS in an outbuilding which backs up my in-house NAS. Because connectivity to the outbuilding is a bastard, I only get around 12Mbps. However, I don't care, as it only means that the backups take longer, and that's a background task. As long as it completes before the next one starts, I'm happy.
Sure I could bore holes in walls, dig a trench out to the outbuilding and run fibre to it, and install a couple of fibre switches, but why?
-
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 11:55 GMT dave 81
Re: In the meantime 10Gb/s has been available for years now ...
Expensive kit? Nah uh. The SSD cache on my NAS is capable of 500MB/S, and the raid will peak at 300MB/s and I regularly saturate my Gig ethernet (at just over 100MB/s) with my video projects. 10Gb would be nice, but its still way too expensive. Looked at 2.5Gb but while cheaper, its not cheap enough and there isn't the wider spread support for it.
-
-
-
Tuesday 8th June 2021 18:35 GMT Version 1.0
Remember the 10Mb Ethernet days?
I've still got a few old 10Mb interfaces around - it was fast back then but I never saw anything (multiple PDPs and BBS's) hacked back in those days even though we had a lot of kit hooked onto the Internet via FTP. A live 400Gb interface means that more systems will be hacked faster ... the potential if you are running a mail server is to see a couple of million administrative login attempts an hour.
Faster Ethernet has both an upside and a downside.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
