2.5 Gb managed switch, worth it?

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DugKing

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  • #1
    Hey,

    During COVID, I took the opportunity to hardwire my house with Cat6 ethernet cable. The gear I have is a Unifi 24-port managed gigabit switch, I rolled my own pfSense router on a Seeed Odyssey device, and a Tripp Lite patch panel. I also have 2x access points, both Unifi, one of them with Wifi 6 (but not 6e), the other just a standard AP. It's all working great, and it was a good project. My ISP at the time was offering only 250 Mb/s fiber service (up and down), and it was really great when they finally offered my 1Gb/s service. That's what I'd been running until May 2024.

    When I called my ISP to renew, they told me they were phasing out the "old infrastructure" and moving everyone to the newly branded Fidium Fiber. I asked for Gigabit service since that's what I already had, and they told me that if I did that, it wouldn't be considered an upgrade from my existing service, so they wouldn't be able to waive the installation fee of $200. Instead, they offered the 2Gb/s service (up and down) all for a monthly price less than that of the 1Gb/s service, AND they could waive the installation fee. OK then, easy decision. And by the way, installation consisted of taking my old fiber modem away and activating/plugging in a new fiber modem. No wiring anything, hardly worth the $200 installation fee. But whatever.

    The issue is that just about everything I have is gigabit only. Almost everything, that is. My new modem is 10Gb, my router has 2x 2.5 Gb ports, and my PC has a 2.5 Gb port. My switch is gigabit, and pretty much every other device in the house is gigabit, not 2.5 Gb.

    I set up my home network with VLANs (watched a lot of Lawrence Systems videos, they're great) mostly as an exercise of learning how to do stuff, but I do like the setup with separate VLANs for IoT, WFH, and Guest networks. Anyway, I'd like to keep those as-is.

    Last week I finally got around to testing out my internet speed by going from my router 2.5 Gb port straight into my PC with its 2.5 Gb port (at the expense of the rest of the house being off line for a bit). Speed test, and yes, I have 2 Gb/s service up and down. Great! But in my normal usage, I won't ever see that speed. In fact, one of the tips from the ISP said that maybe you won't get the full 2 Gb/s on a device, but you can have more bandwidth by multiple devices all getting close to 1 Gb/s each. But because everything goes through my gigabit managed switch, no I won't. The bottleneck is still the switch, and since it can't handle more than 1 Gb/s, that's the max all of my devices behind the switch will see, combined.

    I don't think it's really necessary, but I now know that I have an "extra" gigabit of internet speed that's going unutilized. I was thinking, maybe I can get a 2.5 Gb/s switch and port out at least one hard line to my PC so that I could experience the max of my service at least.

    So I got to thinking, how would that work? Say I got an 8-port 2.5 Gb switch. I'm interested in keeping my VLAN setup the way it is, so would I have to set up the same VLANs on the 8-port switch as I have set up on the 24-port gigabit switch? I don't think I need to stick with Unifi for the 2.5 Gb switch, but if I want to keep my VLANs, I'm pretty sure I'd have to get a managed switch and set up VLANs on the 2.5 Gb switch just like I did on the Unifi 24-port switch. Is that right?

    What would be the best way to give my PC access to the 2 Gb/s internet service, but still be good with my VLAN setup? I'm clearly no networking guru, so I'd be interested to learn a good way to go about this.

    And maybe this is all a mental exercise because it's not worth doing. But dammit, I have all that bandwidth, I'd like to be able to see it!

    Thanks!
     
    Paladin

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  • #2
    "I now know that I have an "extra" gigabit of internet speed that's going unutilized"

    And you always will. ;)

    Even if you get a 2.5 gigabit switch, which you can get starting around $50 for an off brand 4 port one, you still will only see that utilization hit 2.5 gigabit on speed tests (which is really only testing to your ISP mostly) or maybe if you rig a couple machines to download steam games and PS5 games at the same time or something.

    If you only need a few ports, it's cheap enough to get a small 2.5 gbit switch and use it for the couple of machines you have/might get that support it but beyond that I would not bother.
     
    steelghost

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  • #3
    DugKing said:
    In fact, one of the tips from the ISP said that maybe you won't get the full 2 Gb/s on a device, but you can have more bandwidth by multiple devices all getting close to 1 Gb/s each. But because everything goes through my gigabit managed switch, no I won't. The bottleneck is still the switch, and since it can't handle more than 1 Gb/s, that's the max all of my devices behind the switch will see, combined.
    Click to expand...
    The 1Gbit limitation is per port, not total throughput. If you had multiple devices downloading from different places at the same time, you could (at least in theory) make use of your 2Gbit connection. In practice, as Paladin points out, you're very unlikely to actually be able to do that as most servers just don't have that much bandwidth.

    All that said, there's nothing stopping you putting an inexpensive 2.5Gbit managed switch in there to remove even the 1Gbit per port bottleneck of your current switch, just be aware that the vast majority of the time, it won't make any difference to anything ;)
     
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  • #4
    DugKing said:
    I set up my home network with VLANs (watched a lot of Lawrence Systems videos, they're great) mostly as an exercise of learning how to do stuff, but I do like the setup with separate VLANs for IoT, WFH, and Guest networks. Anyway, I'd like to keep those as-is.
    Click to expand...
    How many clients are on each of these VLANs?
    Are any of the VLANs all hardwired or are they all wireless?
    What's the current configuration?
    DugKing said:
    Say I got an 8-port 2.5 Gb switch. I'm interested in keeping my VLAN setup the way it is, so would I have to set up the same VLANs on the 8-port switch as I have set up on the 24-port gigabit switch? I don't think I need to stick with Unifi for the 2.5 Gb switch, but if I want to keep my VLANs, I'm pretty sure I'd have to get a managed switch and set up VLANs on the 2.5 Gb switch just like I did on the Unifi 24-port switch. Is that right?
    Click to expand...
    Yes, although you can still use your existing 24 port switch as well.

    Just to be clear to everyone, you're doing this for your own entertainment and not because you think this level of performance and complexity is required to be a good homeowner.
     
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    Arty50

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  • #6
    I'm essentially in the same boat as you, except I have a 10G service from my ISP. I had 1G Fiber for several years before this. Even during the pandemic with three people working full time from home, we never maxed out our 1G connection or even came close. Unless you have a use case where having the full 2G connection to your computer is helpful, I wouldn't spend the money on upgrading your hardware right now. If you had a use case for that (i.e. moving huge files across the internet on a frequent basis for work where time is money), it's highly likely you'd already know about it. 2.5G hardware is still coming down in price and there are new 5G chipsets coming out that will purportedly bring 2.5G down even further along with it.
     
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  • #7
    Thank you everyone! And yes, for the record, I do not think that my specific use case (internet usage in my home) would even reach the 1Gb/s limit, and this is more of a fun exercise than a necessity.

    First of all, great point about the 1Gb limitation per port, and not the the whole switch. I should test this out by downloading from my PC and my wife's PC and see what kind of speeds we get at the same time. I mean, if that's the case, then I likely won't do anything. Thanks for pointing that out steelghost.

    In terms of the number of clients on each VLAN, let me check right now.

    I have a total of 26 device across ALL my VLANs. The VLANs are IoT, Guest, Main, and WFH. Most of the items are either on the main VLAN or IoT. Again, even setting up the VLANs in the first place was mostly an academic exercise. Fun though. I would say about 25% of the total devices are hardwired, most of the IoT stuff is WiFi, but some of those are hardwired (A/V receiver, TV for example). So yes, this is my own entertainment. I could probably just do away with all of the VLANs and be fine. I like the idea of separating IoT stuff though, and the Work from Home laptop that I brought home.
     
    Paladin

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  • #8
    If you want to use multiple devices that each use a 1 gbit port to soak up that 2.5 gbit internet, you'll need a switch (and/or router) that can connect to the ISP equipment with either 2.5gbit, 5gbit, 10gbit or a bonded link (LACP or similar) so you get 2 gbit or more of link capacity from your network to the ISP. A single 1 gbit link to the ISP equipment will never do more than 970 megabit of real throughput, no matter how many device on the LAN try at the same time.
     
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  • #9
    Paladin is quite right, and I need to apologise for my incomplete and misleading answer. Your current gigabit switch can handle much more than a gigabit of aggregate throughput, but as the WAN uplink is one of your gigabit ports, the total bandwidth available to your client devices to and from the internet cannot exceed that.

    I was trying to make the point that if you had a switch with a faster uplink port to the modem / router, having multiple devices able to download at an aggregate speed would potentially allow you to take advantage of your connection speed, even if they were all connected to a gigabit port. But I kinda failed to mention that bit, I clearly shouldn't be posting before my morning coffee!

    But for all that, the last part of my post remains very true, I think:

    there's nothing stopping you putting an inexpensive 2.5Gbit managed switch in there to remove even the 1Gbit per port bottleneck of your current switch, just be aware that the vast majority of the time, it won't make any difference to anything ;)
    Click to expand...

    (Emphasis mine)
     
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    fellow human

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  • #10
    I was thinking of something similar as I like the sort of theoretical symmetry of having each of my two APs aggregated into a single 2.5G link. Then I found out I could take the SPF module out of my ISP's modem and plug it directly into my UniFi UDMP so got around the problem that way.

    I would assume there are switches which are 1G on every port, but with an uplink port of 2.5 or higher so something like that would probably work in your case. No need for every device to get 2.5.
     
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  • #11
    fellow human said:
    I would assume there are switches which are 1G on every port, but with an uplink port of 2.5 or higher so something like that would probably work in your case. No need for every device to get 2.5.
    Click to expand...
    Well... not for what the OP is asking. But IMO while I think the universal answer has been "no, you're almost certainly not going to get any advantage at all from a 2.5Gbps link out to the Internet", there is a use-case for 2.5Gbps, and it's all on the LAN. If you're in the habit of moving around large files, or running backups to a NAS, 2.5Gbps could actually result in a noticeable improvement. So, if the OP is hell-bent on trying out the 2.5Gbps waters, 2.5Gbps only on the uplink will get him nothing (because it's effectively meaningless on the Internet for the foreseeable future, and doesn't help endpoint-to-endpoint either). A switch with a few 2.5Gbps ports will yield at least a much-less-theoretical speed improvement in local tasks. I have an ultra-low-end unmanaged fanless switch that still gets me around 2.1Gbps on file transfers to and from my NAS over SMB. For me, easily worth it because the cost was negligible. Absolutely not the use-case the OP had in mind though.
     
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  • #12
    CatBus said:
    Well... not for what the OP is asking. But IMO while I think the universal answer has been "no, you're almost certainly not going to get any advantage at all from a 2.5Gbps link out to the Internet", there is a use-case for 2.5Gbps, and it's all on the LAN. If you're in the habit of moving around large files, or running backups to a NAS, 2.5Gbps could actually result in a noticeable improvement. So, if the OP is hell-bent on trying out the 2.5Gbps waters, 2.5Gbps only on the uplink will get him nothing (because it's effectively meaningless on the Internet for the foreseeable future, and doesn't help endpoint-to-endpoint either). A switch with a few 2.5Gbps ports will yield at least a much-less-theoretical speed improvement in local tasks. I have an ultra-low-end unmanaged fanless switch that still gets me around 2.1Gbps on file transfers to and from my NAS over SMB. For me, easily worth it because the cost was negligible. Absolutely not the use-case the OP had in mind though.
    Click to expand...
    You're right, they did say
    DugKing said:
    give my PC access to the 2 Gb/s internet service
    Click to expand...
    which a 1Gb switch with 2.5 uplink would not do. My bad there, I was thinking of my use case which was being able to saturate both APs.

    True also about LAN transfers, that would certainly speed up my Proxmox full image backups! (if I had a 2.5Gb NAS that is)

    Not sure I agree there are no use cases for >1Gb internet though. Torrents come to mind, though there again you'd want >1Gb to a machine.
     
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  • #13
    First thing to do is see if you can just aggregate two 1 Gbps ports from the switch to get a total of 2 Gbps to your "fiber modem".

    If that doesn't work, I'd either go for a cheap unmanaged 4 or 5 port 2.5 GE switch and put that between the fiber thing, your PC and your existing switch. These unmanaged switches will pass along VLAN tagged packets so as long as the devices that connect to that switch are trusted with VLAN boundaries that should be enough.

    Another option is a new managed switch with 24 or so 1 Gbps ports but two faster uplink ports, so you can use one to the fiber thing and one to your PC.
     
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  • #15
    OK, thanks again everyone for the responses. I think the most realistic use-case for my home network would NOT be to get 2 Gb/s to a single device, but rather provide more bandwidth to all devices on the network so that 2 or 3 PCs can each download with a total cap of 2 Gb/s instead of just 1 Gb/s. In total I'd see maybe 1.8 Gb/s at my WAN port for overall traffic, but each device would be getting speeds of around 600 Mb/s.

    In order to increase the size of the pool from which everything pulls, I have a few options (based on suggestions here, thanks again).

    • Aggregate 2x 1Gb ports on my switch. I don't believe I can do that, so that won't work. I have this Unifi switch, by the way.
    • Get a switch that has 10 Gb SFP+ ports and use one of those as the connection to my switch from my router. The fiber modem is using its "10G" (as it's labeled on the modem) port out to my router with a Cat6 cable, and my pfSense router has 2x 2.5 Gb ports on it (one in from WAN, one out to LAN). My current switch has 1Gb SFP ports only. Replacing my 24-port switch with a Unifi that has 10Gb SFP+ ports looks like it would cost around $700, which I don't want to do. There are probably other managed switches (e.g. Mikrotik, Netgear, D-Link, Linksys) that may be cheaper/better than the Unifi equipment. I think I saw a Linksys that supports link aggregation. Do I want to take that step for this exercise? I probably don't.
    • Get a cheaper switch as iljitsch suggested, unmanaged 4-port 2.5 Gb switch, and put that between my router and my existing switch. Use one port on that unmanaged switch for connection to the router, use one to go to just my PC, and use a third port to go to my existing 1Gb switch. In this case, my PC would get the high number on the speed test, but everything else in the house would still be limited to 1Gb.
    I think the best case to get what I want while keeping my VLANs and network organized this way would be to get a managed switch with either link aggregation or with an SFP+ port (and adapters) that would allow for a connection from my router greater than 1Gb. Then, even though all the deviced downstream of the switch would still be limited to 1Gb, I'd be able to get faster concurrent downloads overall.

    I suppose second place would be to segregate just my PC with 2.5Gb and have everything else be as it is now. I'd do this with an unmanaged switch upstream of my existing switch.

    In the end, I'm not sure I'll do anything! I think the best scenario would cost the most and require the most effort.

    This has been super helpful to me, so thanks again.

    PS - I do see the benefit of faster file transfers on my LAN, but my NAS is 1Gb anyway, so I don't think that would be worth replacing either.
     
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  • #16
    SFP(+) is intended for fiber. There are UTP modules, but that's more expensive / less flexible than native NBASE-T, if I'm not mistaken.

    My conclusion has been to jump into the 2.5+ Gbps pond with both feet or just stay at 1 Gbps. In my case, the main limitation in that my 5-year-old NAS will only do 1 Gbps so at a minimum I'd need a new NAS and a new switch. My Mac Mini can do 100/1000/2500/5000/10000 so that's fine and I have a 2.5 GBE adapter for (one of) my laptops.

    My internet speed has been 120 Mbps the past year, which is sufficient if not great. I can go back to 1 Gbps = 930 Mbps internet service easily but how much will that buy me with a distrust of the cloud and only one 4K stream running at a given time?

    So 1 Gbps locally it is for now for me.
     
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  • #17
    DugKing said:
    • Aggregate 2x 1Gb ports on my switch. I don't believe I can do that, so that won't work. I have this Unifi switch, by the way.
    Click to expand...
    Under Technical Specifications: Layer 2 Features I see "LACP port aggregation" so I believe you can.
    DugKing said:
    PS - I do see the benefit of faster file transfers on my LAN, but my NAS is 1Gb anyway, so I don't think that would be worth replacing either.
    Click to expand...
    Your NAS also has 2 1Gb Ethernet ports, so it too can support Link Aggregation. I have that setup on my Synology, but then moved it away from my living room core switch to my office for noise reasons so don't use that feature anymore.

    EDIT: I see you posted in the thread started you're using a Seeed Odyssey as your pfSense firewall so my Option 1 doesn't make sense, but I'll leave it here for reference.

    Can you add a PCIe card with extra ports to your PFSense Router? If you could add 2x1Gb ports there, this would be much simpler. There used to be a lot of cheap quad port server NICs on eBay, at least.

    Option 1: Add extra LACP ports to pfSense
    Code: 
    ISP Modem <-2.5GbE-> pfSense Router <-2.5GbE-> Desktop
                                    <-2x1GbE-> Unifi USW24 Switch <-2x1GbE-> Synology
                                                                  <-1GbE-> Everything else

    Option 2: Add managed 2.5GbE switch between pfSense Router and USW24
    Code: 
    ISP Modem <-2.5GbE->pfSense Router <-2.5GbE-> New 2.5Gb Switch   <-2.5GbE-> Desktop
                                                                 <-2x1GbE-> Unifi USW24 Switch <-2x1GbE-> Synology
                                                                                               <-1GbE-> Everything else

    Option 3 is to use the unmanaged switch as you said and limit the USW24 bandwidth to both internet and Desktop to 1Gb.
     
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  • #19
    DugKing said:
    PS - I do see the benefit of faster file transfers on my LAN, but my NAS is 1Gb anyway, so I don't think that would be worth replacing either.
    Click to expand...
    FWIW, I was in very much the same boat. I'd had a trusty old DS218+ serving away for years. My only complaint ever about the thing was transfer speeds being capped at 1Gbps, and I couldn't justify the cost of a whole new NAS for that. But then, this project happened: https://github.com/bb-qq/r8152

    I can verify it worked for my NAS, which likely means it'll also work for yours. The level of hackery is minimal, and the warranty was long expired anyway. This is the USB adapter I used: https://plugable.com/products/usbc-e2500

    For $30, I felt it was very worth the expense.
     
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  • #20
    CatBus said:
    FWIW, I was in very much the same boat. I'd had a trusty old DS218+ serving away for years. My only complaint ever about the thing was transfer speeds being capped at 1Gbps, and I couldn't justify the cost of a whole new NAS for that. But then, this project happened: https://github.com/bb-qq/r8152

    I can verify it worked for my NAS, which likely means it'll also work for yours. The level of hackery is minimal, and the warranty was long expired anyway. This is the USB adapter I used: https://plugable.com/products/usbc-e2500

    For $30, I felt it was very worth the expense.
    Click to expand...
    ha cool, thanks for this. I'm still rocking a (iirc) 418 so this may come in handy someday. Bookmarked.
     
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  • #22
    GaitherBill said:
    I plan on doing the same with my two Synology NAS.

    The user reports are very positive.
    Click to expand...
    Very positive here, for sure. For me, it's likely to work as more than a stopgap until an inevitable future NAS upgrade. I don't need much in the way of a NAS -- a simple two-drive system works fine for my needs -- but I want speed. However, manufacturers seem to tie fast network options only to their high-end systems. So even if I do have to get a new NAS down the road, there's a strong case to be made to get another cheap two-drive system with SSDs and a gigabit port, and use a dongle again, instead of a more expensive system with builtin fast networking.

    EDIT: Also, FWIW, if you use that USB dongle with a Windows system, don't use the builtin Windows driver. Performance is about 50% if you're lucky. Download the driver from the product site.
     
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  • #23
    Ah, this is pretty sweet! When I got one of those 2.5GE USB dongles I of course plugged it into my DS218+, but either it didn't do anything or it ran at 1 Gbps. Interestingly, my Macs had ancient RealTek drivers (isn't that always how it goes?) which didn't recognize the new chip's capabilities... but it still ran at 2500 Mbps while ifconfig reported 1000.

    So now I have to decide whether the upgrade is worth the cost and how much power these new 2.5GE switches use. My existing 8 port 1GE switch only uses 2 W!

    Obviously copying data to/from my Macs' SSDs will benefit, but a big use case for me is copying files from the NAS to a USB thumb drive and that is not maxing out GE anyway. (Although getting newer ones will probably help there.) The big question is to/from an external HDD, so I should test that.
     
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  • #25
    DugKing said:
    PS - I do see the benefit of faster file transfers on my LAN, but my NAS is 1Gb anyway, so I don't think that would be worth replacing either.
    Click to expand...

    I don't have much experience with Synology but a quick search suggests it's possible to use a USB 2.5G adapter. This is a meaningful upgrade for NAS usage and that is true regardless of upstream internet speed.

    My experience has also been that wifi 6E (the 6 ghz version) can exceed gigabit in real world usage provided it is served by a fast enough network.

    I do think there's utility to >gigabit internet provided there's no data cap because you can start thinking about things like backing up an entire NAS, and when you're talking about large scale transfers like that the software will very cheerfully use multiple connections and saturate virtually any connection speed you can throw at it. Over a gigabit doesn't make any difference for web browsing, but there are new use cases that would never even occur to you that become possible.
     
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  • #26
    CatBus said:
    FWIW, I was in very much the same boat. I'd had a trusty old DS218+ serving away for years. My only complaint ever about the thing was transfer speeds being capped at 1Gbps, and I couldn't justify the cost of a whole new NAS for that. But then, this project happened: https://github.com/bb-qq/r8152
    Click to expand...
    Cool, it works!

    Lacking a switch that can do better than gigabit Ethernet, I tried this with a direct connection from my Mac Mini with a 10 Gbps - 100 Mbps Ethernet adapter and a USB 2.5 Gbps USB adapter on the Synology side, copying just over a dozen big media files adding up to around 22 GB.

    Results:

    Standard 1 GE to a USB HDD: 9 min 43 sec
    Standard 1 GE to the Mac Mini SSD: 3 min, 41 sec

    2.5 GE to a USB HDD: 8 min 50 sec
    2.5 GE to the Mac Mini SSD: 2 min 29 sec

    I'm too lazy to calculate the numbers for a best case at 1 Gbps, but for sure you're not getting the max bandwidth at either speed. For NAS to HDD the difference is minimal and no way investing in better hardware is worth it.

    For NAS to SSD the benefit is a good deal better but still less than convincing...

    So I don't think it makes sense to invest in a faster switch for this. Optimizing the data copying strategies will yield much better results.
     
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  • #29
    iljitsch said:
    For NAS to SSD the benefit is a good deal better but still less than convincing...
    Click to expand...
    Sort of surprised by the poor showing. I'm typically moving single 20+ GB files at just under 1/2 the time it took at 1Gbps. I'm wondering, do you have SSDs or HDDs in your NAS? I have two mirrored SSDs on the NAS, and an SSD on the client, so I'm pretty sure disk transfer speeds are limited by the network interface, not anything else.
     
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  • #30
    iljitsch said:
    So now I have to decide whether the upgrade is worth the cost and how much power these new 2.5GE switches use. My existing 8 port 1GE switch only uses 2 W!
    Click to expand...
    Serve The Home recently did a roundup on 2.5G switches, and several use about 2W. However, several use way more for no apparent reason.
     
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  • #31
    sdh said:
    Serve The Home recently did a roundup on 2.5G switches, and several use about 2W. However, several use way more for no apparent reason.
    Click to expand...
    Hey they picked the MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN in the managed category.

    10 Gb + 2.5 Gb is at the level that you may want some more advanced features like freedom to place the router anywhere, just VLAN your PON port to it. And MikroTik really is at a different level than entry level switches and some routers even.

    It can play wifi controller, be a BGP router, terminate your VPN and much more, the CRS (r=router) runs the RouterOS7 and seeing it as "competitor" to a manager TP Link is weird :biggreen:

    And here I am currently running it just as a 10 Gb uplink dumb switch :censored:
     
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  • #32
    sdh said:
    Serve The Home recently did a roundup on 2.5G switches, and several use about 2W. However, several use way more for no apparent reason.
    Click to expand...
    For those (justifiably) fearing random no-name cheap Chinese products... FWIW, I installed this model recently:

    www.servethehome.com

    Gigaplus GP-S25-0802 8-port 2.5GbE and 2-port 10G Review

    The Gigaplus GP-SW25-0802 is the cheapest 8-port 2.5GbE and 2-port SFP+ 10GbE switch we have reviewed and is better than we expected
    www.servethehome.com www.servethehome.com

    Unmanaged, very cheap, dead quiet, runs cool. Probably not a top-tier performer, but I had no expectation of that, and what I get seems quite adequate for my home. 10g uplink and downlink is a nice plus.
     
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    fellow human

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  • #33
    iljitsch said:
    Cool, it works!

    Lacking a switch that can do better than gigabit Ethernet, I tried this with a direct connection from my Mac Mini with a 10 Gbps - 100 Mbps Ethernet adapter and a USB 2.5 Gbps USB adapter on the Synology side, copying just over a dozen big media files adding up to around 22 GB.

    Results:

    Standard 1 GE to a USB HDD: 9 min 43 sec
    Standard 1 GE to the Mac Mini SSD: 3 min, 41 sec

    2.5 GE to a USB HDD: 8 min 50 sec
    2.5 GE to the Mac Mini SSD: 2 min 29 sec

    I'm too lazy to calculate the numbers for a best case at 1 Gbps, but for sure you're not getting the max bandwidth at either speed. For NAS to HDD the difference is minimal and no way investing in better hardware is worth it.

    For NAS to SSD the benefit is a good deal better but still less than convincing...

    So I don't think it makes sense to invest in a faster switch for this. Optimizing the data copying strategies will yield much better results.
    Click to expand...
    Thanks for this. What’s your drive config for that NAS? I’m running 2x4TB and 2x8TB HDDs with btrfs, 1 disk redundancy etc. and I think even getting 1Gb out of it is pushing it. The SoC just isn’t that strong.

    I’m sure it’s great with SSDs and/or striping though.
     
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  • #34
    fellow human said:
    Thanks for this. What’s your drive config for that NAS? I’m running 2x4TB and 2x8TB HDDs with btrfs, 1 disk redundancy etc. and I think even getting 1Gb out of it is pushing it. The SoC just isn’t that strong.

    I’m sure it’s great with SSDs and/or striping though.
    Click to expand...
    It's a Synology DS218+, with "8 TB" Seagate drives in both bays in a mirroring configuration. Note that the drives are pretty close to full, with around 400 GB free space.

    I did some more testing. It looks like using the cp command in the terminal (handy because then I can put "time" in front of it so no manual stopwatching) is somewhat slower than using the Finder to copy files.

    At 1 Gbps I could get a pretty consistent 110 MB/sec (fake 10^6 MBs, not real 2^20 ones, but at least so far nobody has redefined the second...). That's close to the theoretical max, which is something like 117. But at 2.5 Gbps the write speed to the NAS initially starts well over 200 MB/sec (data going into the cache?) but then things slow down and I get an inconsistent 100 - 200 MB/sec. Like so:

    Screenshot 2024-07-01 at 10.48.16.png

    This shows the data read from the local SSD, but the network traffic looks the same.

    Interestingly, files that got on the NAS through BitTorrent are slower and the drives rattle more than "normal" files written start to finish. As BitTorrent tends to download parts of files in random order, I guess those files end up on the drives fragmented.

    I also did a test with a USB HDD to/from my Mac and that gave me about 120 MB/sec. So assuming those 3.5" Seagates are about the same speed as this 2.5" drive and good parallel reading of data, it should be possible to get well over 200 MB/sec, right?
     
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