Comparing 10GBASE-T SFP+ RJ-45 Copper Transceiver Modules

tom here from lawrence systems and let's talk about some challenges with 10 gig so the simple solution is i take a dac cable plug it into my uh mikrotik which happens to be the cr 305 1g i've reviewed this one before and then i plug it over into my device that hopefully isn't further away than the distance well then you can get a bigger one of these and go a little further uh but then you're like okay but i have rj45 on my computer but i also have a speaker tick here so i go ahead and pop one of these devices in and now i can go the full spec or did you not realize that these don't go the full spec and that's what i wanted to talk about was using cat6 and cat6a seems like a great solution in terms of you'll be able to go the distance but then when you throw these in the mix they don't necessarily work now this unifi xg6 poe has standard 10 gig rg45 ports no problem does the distance but when you start getting into using the adapters the sfp plus rj45 adapters that isn't the case and i want to talk about the comparison between the three different models i have here and the distances we're able to get with them before we dive into the details let's first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you'd like to hire a sharp project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now the first thing we need to be very clear on is where the cabling standard is is going to be different than where these devices are and the cabling standard is despite what many commenters on youtube say otherwise cat6 cable should not exceed 55 meters and the cat6a cable should not exceed 100 meters these are just the certified specs and if you want to deep dive into how those specs are made this is a interview i did with dan pereira which i'll leave a link to which is great it's all about cabling standards and why talk to dan well he sits on the board that helps certify cabling standards so i learned a lot uh during this interview so i will leave a link to this if you're interested i'll also leave a link to the article over on fs.com talking about 10 gig over cat 6 cat 6a and cat 7 so you guys can debate and argue and leave comments now let's get to the fun part and that's this so when we're looking at these devices we're going to start here with this one and the fact that it says 30 meters right here this is the thing that people often overlook where it says up to 30 meters and let's look at the meeker tick one now the mega tick one it says right here 30 meters in the description it doesn't say it over here and over on their website it says distance of up to 200 meters which has to be is certainly a typo and that's where some of the confusion come in now the fs.com one that we ordered goes up to 80 meters and they have models that do 30 and they have models that do this 80 meters and that's where we wanted to start with the testing as i ordered one of these and i wanted to compare it to the other devices that we have now we take a close look at the fs.com ones they look pretty much the same maybe there's a little bit more metal on this end of it but for the most part other than being ever so slightly longer they all look the same here so we have the qsfp tech we have the fs.com and we have the meeker tick rj10 now it was pointed out to me by serve the home and i'll leave a link they have some articles and they review these as well that there may be different revisions because i bought these a little while ago so these are the ones i'm testing with that i bought early on this year so mileage may vary i don't know if there's different stock if you bought one today but what i did find was both the qsfp tech and the meeker tick one performed identically they both only go 30 meters and i mean 30 meters whether you use cat 6 whether you use cat 6a it didn't seem to matter once you exceed that 30 meters they have a hard time connecting they just pause and wait and when you go quite a bit over 30 meters if they connect at all they claim to be connected at 10 gig but won't even transfer at one gig and with a ton of retries and errors doing iperf tests so these pretty much are very limited to exactly the spec they set and that was pretty clear we tried them in both this microchip right here which is a pretty great little device i'm really happy with it it's really popular i know from among people putting together home labs but putting them in here or putting them in this unify made absolutely no difference the distance and the link up times were still well slow and painful once you exceeded the distance listed of 30 meters then we move over to the fs.com that claims 80 meters and that was interesting we had no problems with 80 meters 80 meters linked up right away then we went to uh 90 meters and we were doing 90 meters instead of just 90 meters with your standard cat 6a which is spec we use this cat6 now i know this is 555 megahertz i wanted to point that out and there happened to be 90 meters in this box and uh it worked great i had no problem the exact number's 92 meters was in this we snapped some ends on here and this is just cat 6 here not cat 6a and it minimal a absolute minimal amount of errors and we moved quite a few terabytes of data i had to resync some freenas servers so i stuck this cable in between them i popped them in the maker tick switch and uh wow i'm impressed with how well these worked these not so much just it constantly aired it would eventually transfer using these when they're a little over spec but eventually with really slow speeds constant retries and errors and uh you know drop packets and etc etc but the fs.com even using cable that is not spec for this so out of spec was working shockingly well so i gotta really say that these fs.com ones i'm really happy with i only had them running for about a week so this is not a long-term test review we don't put a lot of these in production most of the time when a client is speccing something out the servers are all connected either via dac or fiber optic cable and we don't use rj45 for long 10-game runs unless you're connecting them to pcs now as far as that same 10 gig cable i did do one other test i got a few errors on the fs.com but when i used this same box of cable and plugged it into the rj45s on like this switch here no errors at all the transfers went perfectly fine now a couple other notes though someone said that these will potentially cause problems because they pull up more wattage the watts are limited by whatever the manufacturer designed inspect so i don't think that will be an issue but as i said this was not a long-term test also of note if you pop in a handful of these adapters to convert this to be our j45 with sfp pluses there's even i believe a warning somewhere from microtech or a forum postside scene this will definitely get hot if you put a few of these in here set a small fan or something on there the long-term effects of the heat yeah maybe a problem on here now as one other test we did do just to make sure it wasn't anything with the meeker tick box is i pop these in like the unifi here and the other unifi i have back there the 30 meter limit is the 30 meter limit didn't seem to matter at all which device i used there was absolutely no noticeable dis difference between them and the same thing with this this had no problem doing 80 meters or that little bit over spec with 90 meters using just cat6 which surprisingly worked very very well we did one more test with cat5 it won't go quite as far but uh yeah you can get out of spec even with cat 5 and still have very few retries now that was my test and my experiment this is not something i'm recommending but i realize people building a home lab they may have more limited resources or already ran cable and you know they want to make sure that there's they're able to do this before they run out and buy these so if you are looking to get one of these adapters do take a look at the distance that they support i know more than just fs.com supports these but that's the one i decided to go with test because a lot of people recommended these we've bought some other dac cables and a few other random things from them they've always seemed good the reviews generally are good on the fs.com stuff so i'll give a shout out to these adapters that are relatively new i think on their website and they definitely work great i didn't notice also any difference in heat between these or these they all seem to get up to the same temperature uh even running them over time and moving all the data once they reached a peak temperature they didn't seem to exceed that even running no data matter of fact they seem to get to that temperature barely doing anything they kind of just hover around that temperature which they were reporting on the micro tick i believe it was about 45 c so 45 centigrade on there is where they hovered sometimes they go up a little bit higher uh but not much and of course this is going to vary greatly with whether or not you have a fan on this and how you're dissipating the heat and whether or not you have an actively or passively cooled device et cetera et cetera but my overall um if you're looking for something to go that little bit of distance and maybe you overlooked and purchased one of these that didn't realize you couldn't figure out why you were having so many problems or you couldn't get the full 10 gig it's probably because a lot of them you may have not noticed that despite micro tick beaker tick for having a 200 meter list on their website uh they will only do 30 meters much like the amazon link says on there but i'll leave a link to this particular one at fs.com if you're interested in it but these ones also seem to work perfectly fine if you have the shorter distances if you're doing your home lab all in the same room well you're probably not that far away and you should be able to get away with it perfectly fine all right and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you like this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like youtube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 64,154

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: dL3DiKF4tY0

Length: 10min 50sec (650 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 03 2021