Anyone else upgraded their LAN hardware for Chia?

Here’s me copying at 2.5 gpbs to a NAS on a 10 gbps port attached via the same Zyxel switch!

I also had to buy the SFP+ media adapter for those 10 gbps ports, I went with

because of course I want RJ-45! I even specified Cat7 cable, since I figured we might as well…

Cat7 can also support 10 Gbps, but laboratory testing has successfully shown its ability to transmit up to 40 Gb at 50 meters and even 100 Gb at 15 meters. The newer “Class F” cabling can support frequencies of up to 600 Mhz. That said, Cat7 has not been approved as a cable standard for telecommunications.

Cat7 offers extensive shielding to reduce signal attenuation and is relatively stiff in comparison to previous generations of cabling. Both individual pairs are shielded, with an additional layer of shielding over the entire cable. The shielding needs to be grounded and Cat7 also requires special GigaGate45 (GG45) connectors to take full advantage of higher performance features.

a 5 pack of 10 ft cat6 is $17.99 compared to $22.99 for cat7 w/ amazon basics brand at least!

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Funny you should mention this Jeff!! I feel like every new thread you create, you’re reading the thoughts from my head. :laughing: So Chia has forced me to upgrade everything!! I hadn’t built a system since my beloved E8400 Core 2 Duo Hackintosh in 2010. 11 years of contentment, and Chia has me building 3 systems in the course of a month. Then once I had my full node, and started using the others as plotters/harvesters I maxed out my wireless gateway and 10/100 switch the first rsync I attempted. So everything got hardwired with cat5e (which I owned but wasn’t using) and I bought a gigabit switch :man_facepalming: Chia is seriously “the great equalizer” it pushes the theoretical performance of every piece of hardware.

On the bright side :sunny: I didn’t have to upgrade any nic’s because they were already gigabit and I’d just never thought to check. Had to retire “old reliable” my 10/100 linksys switch that was like 18 years old

I tired to keep it simple, and picked up one of these: TP-Link TL-SG108

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Fortunately some machines are starting to come with 2.5gbps port standard. For example, the Phantom Canyon NUC (my htpc) has a 2.5gbps port! And you can add a 2.5gbps port fairly inexpensively with these USB to 2.5gbps ethernet adapters:

The above is how my Ryzen 5950x machine is connected to my network :point_up_2: … I disabled the onboard gigabit in the BIOS, even.

You forget how slow 1 gigabit really is in this day and age… a miserly 111-113mb/sec of throughput, which for a Chia k32 means it’s a minimum of over fifteen minutes to copy it anywhere! :scream:

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Here is some comments for you:

If you a utilizing a NAS or more to store plots, try not maximum the bandwidth or I/O of you NAS, so if you got a 2.5Gbe interface of you NAS, two parallel copy task at 1Gbe probably is still fine.

Also, you should also take care the I/O of your HDD, if you are farming on that drive at the meanwhile.

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