AFFORDABLE In-Home 10GbE Networking!

[Music] what's up guys and welcome to friday flights an actual affordable home 10 gigabit networking solution is finally here but does it actually work right around three years ago linus tech tips posted a tutorial to 10x your networking speed on a budget in which they bought a couple of ebay 10 gigabit networking cards and showed you how to link two pcs together with a 10 gigabit link unfortunately at that time due to the cost of 10 gigabit switches using that as a home network solution really wasn't feasible as you could only link the two pcs together over 10 gig and you still had to have your cat5 coming into your existing onboard ethernet port to get internet access as well as access to the rest of your home network but hold on a second linus sorry i couldn't resist doing that what if i want that solution to be plug and play i want to put a 10 gigabit network card into my pc run a 10 gig cable over to a network switch and then have that network switch interface with the rest of my home network there's no funny ip addressing or multiple network cards on a single pc is that possible well microtech has a brand new switch that is actually affordable at 110 that promises to do just that so let's take a look at it for those who aren't familiar with microtic and honestly i'm not surprised if you're not they're a networking company that's out of latvia and they're known for producing a lot of routers and switches with high-end features at pretty reasonable prices uh and i've been using them for years on the enterprise side of things but this is the first time that i bought one of their devices for my home and that's simply because of the price to feature set that's inside of this so this is the switch itself it is the microtech crs 305-1g dash 4s plus in i wish they had a little bit more creative name for it than just the uh enterprise standards but hey that's what we get so this is a five port network switch unmanaged it has four sfp plus 10 gigabit network ports as well as a single rj45 one gigabit network port with power over ethernet in so if you have a poe capable switch or you have a poe injector you don't even have to hook this into wall power speaking of the wall power there are two 12 volt inputs on the rear so you can have redundant power input options on this switch around the side we have our activity indicators and our power indicator so that's about it it's a pretty simple device but the speeds that i've been getting out of this this last week have been pretty incredible so let's go ahead and walk through what you actually need to get this plugged into your home network and what it will cost you in the end much like that linus tech tips video i also scoured ebay although these are now available on amazon if you'd rather do that this is a mellanox connectx 2 sfp plus network card for your pc it uses an 8x pci and it's actually pretty affordable this was only about 20 or i think 35 dollars if you buy them in a pair now there are a couple different methods of connecting this to this as you can tell this isn't just a standard rj45 network cable i'm going to go over the four different methods that you can possibly use in a home situation and we'll kind of go over pros and cons of each the first method i'm going to show you is by far the most cost effective and best for short distances that is 3 to 15 or 20 feet and that's using a dac or a direct attach copper sfp plus cable do note an sfp cable will not work so make sure you're buying the right thing so this as i drop it hey this is the linux tech tips video so this three foot video so this three foot cable cost me about 13 on amazon again link down in the video description i also got a nine-foot cable for i think 18 so pretty reasonable for the distances we're running uh now one thing to keep in mind when buying these cables is the branding that's on them this particular cable is for cisco devices uh there's a whole bunch of different brandings that are out there there's cisco there's aruba there's hp there's intel there's broadcom there's ubiquity which ones do you buy well these devices tended not to care which branding was on the the uh the cable although some network devices will care what the branding is and won't work with other branded cables for instance intel network cards sometimes only work with intel branded cables so that is an issue you may run into your mileage may vary but for these two particular devices cisco and ubiquiti worked the best for me so that covers my desktop pcs but what about the server in the closet that's the whole point of doing 10 gigabit networking in my home and that's more than 20 feet away well for that we're going to run fiber optic now there's two different types of fiber optic connections we're only going to worry about multi-mode fiber optic connections which is 850 nanometer wavelength there's also a 13 30 nanometer wavelength that's single mode optics you really don't need to worry about that unless you're doing like building to building connections and even then unless you're spamming multiple miles don't worry about it multi-mode is what you want for home use because it's a lot less expensive this right here is an sfp plus multi-mode optic and it plugs into the switch just the same as the dac cables do it's using what's called an lc fiber optic connector and again links down in the video description for the exact cable that you need just make sure you get an lc to lc multi-mode optic cable because the cables are different themselves as well so this is what the lc connector looks like it plugs into the switch just like that and we're ready to power on and start getting all that 10 gigabit goodness so let's see how well this thing works and about an hour later i'm editing my video and i realized i forgot to mention what the fourth type of sfp plus connection was and you can actually get an rj45 10 gigabit adapter but i don't recommend doing it two reasons number one is the rj45 to sfp plus adapter is about 40 and up depending on what model you need and unless you need to connect to a 10 gigabit rj45 device you're really not saving any money over a dac or a multi-mode fiber optic run the other reason is because it's very very cable dependent cat5e will not actually run 10 gigabit signal you can only get one gig out of a cat5e cast six you can only get it up to about 25 or 30 feet you really need to go with a cas6 a cable which is almost as expensive as the fiber optic cable so i really don't recommend that connector simply just from an economic standpoint it's much more cost effective in this home environment to run dac or multi-mode fiber optics so over my left shoulder here you can see i've got my microtech switch with the dac cable going haphazardly up into my workstation and that fiber optic cable dripping down on the ground and heading over to my server rack and i'll clean all that up later okay so we're very very close one thing you're going to run into when doing high speed networking like this is you're going to run into bottlenecks that you didn't expect now i bet you didn't expect the bottleneck and a 10 gigabit network to be the right speed on the nvme drive in my workstation did you however that seems to be about 650 megabytes per second but when going the other way the read speed on that drive is more than enough to feed the server and i'm getting the full 1.05 gigabytes per second that i should be seeing over that link the best part of this setup is there's no mess there's no fuss there's no configurations there's no tricking windows and descending files that fast there's no weird configurations on the server there's no static ip addressing there's no weird routing or ip table work it's all literally just plug and play this works just like your home router and a home switch would only it's 10 gigabit instead of one so if you're looking to hook up two pcs on 10 gigabit networking no mess no fuss plug and play it's actually less than 200 for this whole setup including the cards and the cabling and the switch and everything you need to do this and you can hook up to four pcs or four different network devices up to this via 10 gigabit networking it's really really impressive what microtech has done for this price probably the best part about the switch it's completely fanless i don't know if you've shopped for 10 gigabit network switches in the past usually all of them have some pretty obscenely loud fans because they're meant for network rack installation they're meant for putting in a closet or a network room somewhere that you don't have to listen to them this is made for desktop so for less than 200 you can get 10 gigabit networking in your house between multiple pcs but what do you guys think of this one can you see yourself installing a microtech crs305-1g-4s plus in your home network anytime soon i should have pulled the linus and just given this thing a nickname anyway let me know down in the comments below if you're looking at doing a home network setup like this for yourself make sure to check out the amazon affiliate links down in the video description and as soon as this is available on amazon i will certainly be adding an amazon affiliate link to this but at the moment i will link to the website that i bought it from i don't remember the name of it offhand but i will also post that down below be sure to like this video and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already and be sure to follow me on twitter craft computing so you can keep up with my daily shenanigans as always thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you in the next video cheers guys

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 627,102

Keywords: 10Gb Network switch, fanless 10Gb switch, cheap 10GbE, SFP+, fast home network switch, 10Gb router

Id: MDiiHN0MPdA

Length: 8min 32sec (512 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/32BP]

I though this might be of interest to us DIY'ers.

[u/EMdoc12]

UBNT needs to make on of these for the unifi line. I’d buy it!!

[u/HootleTootle]

I want one, only because my new QNAP has a 10Gb port on it. I don't need it in any way, but I still want it.

Of course that means I'd need a 10Gb NIC in my PC...and fibre module for my HP 24-port...

[u/HalfBakedOne]

At 1:44 he refers to it as an unmanaged switch, but that doesn't seem right, as it can run SwOS or RouterOS. Can't find any exact information but it should support the standard feature sets of these.

[u/lildergs]

Hm my question is how much are the modules?

[u/SHANE523]

I am kicking myself in the ass right now. Not that there is anything wrong with it but I bought the QNap 10Gb 12 port, I should have spent the extra and got the Unifi US-16-XG for the home. The QNap is fine, just an unmanaged switch and is a backbone so no big deal but could have done more with the Unifi IF I needed to.

​

I did get the Unifi for the office (2 for now and 3rd will be in a few months (1 for each site)), the entire office network is Unifi so no brainer there.

[u/jcgruenhage]

Definitely a cool switch. More interesting IMO is the CRS317-1G-16S+RM. That has 16 SFP+ Ports and isn't that expensive either (<400€)

[u/cheezbergher]

If you have a little more cash I'd highly recommend one of their newer POE switches with 4 SFP+ cages. https://mikrotik.com/product/crs328_24p_4s_rm

You get an additional 24 gigabit ports with dual voltage POE, selectable 802.3af/at or 24v passive. Configuring the switch is very different from almost any other switch on the market but documentation is pretty good and easy to learn it.

[u/TheTacoPete]

When can I buy it on amazon?