Re: Wired every time
Given your total cable run lengths are going to be sub 30m I expect your installation to support speeds significantly faster than 10GbE
Yeah, but even 10Gb kit is out of my (home) league at the moment and I'm struggling to think of a use case other than shortening the time it takes to transfer large video and photo files into and out of my NAS. Maybe in 5 years I could look at putting a 10Gb card in my NAS and another in my main computer and getting a switch with some 10GbE ports but at the moment that looks like a £1,000+ option so a second 1Gb card in the NAS and a bonded/trunked connection would ease the situation for nowhere near as much money - thirty quid for an Intel-based NIC and my cheap switch is already capable of (limited) port trunking :-)
That said, and I realise futurology only works if you're Harry Seldon, but in a domestic situation, even in 10 years' time I suspect that if 10Gb is widely adopted, it'll mainly be because manufacturers are just fitting the parts as standard, rather than for any practical reason.
I was going to write that 10 years is a long time in computing and that amazing things happen in quicker timescales, but I'm not so sure that's true any more. I bought my first stand-alone 100Mbit switch (i.e. as opposed to the one in the back of an ADSL modem) some 16 years ago and felt bad because a friend of mine had "saved money" by buying a 10Mbit hub. He saved about £15 over the cost of my switch. I bought my first 1Gbit switch perhaps 10 years ago for about the same price. 10Gbit switches - even those with just a few 10Gb ports - are still ten times that cost or more. By rights it should be possible to buy a 5 or 8 port desktop 10Gb switch for less than £50 by now.
Maybe it's the lack of a use case?
On a different subject, my last "main computer", based around an AMD A10, lasted seven years before I replaced it. It would have managed another one or two if it hadn't failed (processor died, probably because of dust-related stress) and the new machine keeps all the components other than the processor, motherboard & memory, and an indulgent NVMe SSD.
M.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
