Hello,
I reached that limit, that sending plots to external HDD is very inconvenient because of the amount of data (10 TB per day, multiple machines).
Anybody is using 10 Gbps ethernet cards?
I have a few plotters and a one farmer that I would like to use to send the plots.
What cheap 10 Gbps switch I should use? And does cheap 10 Gbps switches exists?
Not cheap but this is the one I’m using and it’s “affordable”
NETGEAR 8-Port 10G Multi-Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch (XS508M) - with 1 x 10G SFP+, Desktop or Rackmount, and Limited Lifetime Protection
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Thx.
I will solve this problem with cheap quad ethernet cards + 4 ethernet cables to each card using Etherchannel (ethernet bonding).
I need to use a cheap router with LACP - then I should get 400 MB/s without expensive SFP+ cards / switches.
I have
Switch: Mikrotik crs305-1g-4s+in (4x SFP+ 10Gbps, 1x RJ45 gigabit uplink)
Netwotk adapters: Intel X520 + DAC cables both cheap from ebay
With this setup i have 1GB/s iperf , or RAM / NVME copy between SFP+ ports.
EDIT: if you want only one switch, you can go with MikroTik CRS328-24P-4S+RM (24 gigabit PoE ports + 4x SFP+ 10gig)
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This is a great response. You can do 10g between two systems for less than $100, and your first upgrade could be $150 for that 4-port Mikrotik switch. It makes a big difference when you start moving 100g files between systems with SSDs!
Lots and lots of used 10g stuff on ebay.
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I recommend going to 2.5gbps before jumping all the way to 10gpbs. I personally like this Zyxel which has a mixture of two 10gbps, two 2.5gpbs, and eight 1 gbps:
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the 10gbe switch I suggested does 10gbe over cat 6 (rj45) no sfp+!
Lots of outdated content online, pre full adoption of 10gbe over rj45
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So it is possible to use a normal Cat6e cable for 10 Gbe - interesting!
But I see that X520 network card has only a SPF+ output - how you are attaching the X520 to Ethernet?
I am not a network administrator, sorry for a noob question.
The SPF+ ports, you buy an adapter to convert them to RJ45.
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They have NIC’s that are 10gbe rj45, some servers have swap-able modules
https://www.amazon.com/10Gtek-X540-T2-Converged-Network-Adapter/dp/B01HMGWOU8
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Thank you very much @vandy @Lamiaceae @codinghorror @BadAttitude I will start to hunt on ebay.
Any clues why SPF cables are so expensive, vs the CAT6e ?
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From cca 10m+ DAC cables have to be active (signal amplification in SFP+ modules) whitch means some electronic in cables on the both ends…
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What about the speed of the disks?. You can have the fastest Ethernet but 7200 RPM disks won’t be able to get any file fast.
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Yes – but most modern 3.5" spinny rust disks can easily exceed standard gigabit ethernet.
That’s why I think 2.5gbps is a good target, personally.
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I recently updated my home network to 10Gbps fiber everywhere. I picked up a used Cisco switch for about $300 on eBay. Also, you can usually find decent SFP+ modules on ebay if you buy in bulk and then just go to MonoPrice for the fiber.
Switch: Cisco N5K-C5548UP-FA | eBay
SFP+ Modules: SFP-10G-SR V03 Original CISCO 10-2415-03 850nm 10GBASE-SR SFP+ Multi mode Module | eBay
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12TB Easystores soak up plots at 120-180MB/s (180 at ths start/outside of the disk, 120 once full). So you’ll get around a 50% speed boost with just that one 7200 RPM disk.
And… that’s just one disk. Once you’re copying plots to say 4 disks at the same time: then you’re using 5x+ the speed of GigE. If you have the switch, then adding 10g to a plotter is only another $50 for card+cable.
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If you are copying plots between Windows 10 machines, you can plugin multiple cheap USB gigabit nics and it will “just work” using SMB3 multichannel!
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Do you know if this works so easily on Linux ? I see SMB3 is available on my Ubuntu 20 but i haven’t tried it yet. I have a handful of 10GB NIC but not enough slots on my plotter MB (they each have HBA, NVM in PCIE/4, GPU) so bumping 1GB → 2-3GB is a big help
Could you switch to a Nvidia G710 or AMD Firepro GPU, which fit in a 1x slot… and get a valuable 16x slot back?
I am actually using an old GPU mining 1->16 slot USB link to do the same already - on Linux SOME MB will go “headless” (no GPU card), some will not - still have no slots when NVME takes 1, HBA takes 1 - i just picked up a Dual GB that first in small slot so that might help - I also don’t have a 10GB Switch so could only assemble point to point connections - I might move to that but i can just squeeze in 1 GB now and 2 GB ongoing - as long as i am not actually “watching” transfers
So yeah i have 4x10GB cards but require a notable investment to be able to use them fully
They are 520’s - but i no switch so it is just copper p2p interlinks