Copper (CAT6) vs Fiber (SFP+) for high speed ethernet networking - Speed vs Price

all right how's it going y'all today we're going to be going over the difference between fiber optic cables and copper ethernet cables whenever you're wanting to connect stuff at especially higher throughputs and so this right here is your standard copper ethernet cable this is a spool of cat6 cable that you can actually use to make as many cables as you like and it's the one that's probably hooked up to your router right now it is very simple to manufacture you can easily go through and just create a tip at home for very cheap and build your own cables the cable itself is ultra cheap and is very durable you can throw it in the walls and even cooler with poe you can actually use it to power devices so if you've got something like a security camera that needs a network connection you can actually run both power and ethernet over the exact same cable with poe and power the security camera and give it the ethernet connection with a single cable which is so much better than trying to hire a high voltage electrician you can hire low voltage electrician and have them put in ethernet cables for all your security cameras and so then on my right right here is what's called fiber optic cable so instead of sending the data across this line using electrical signals like it is on a copper cable you're actually sending it using light and so the nice thing about light is you can send it for miles and have very low signal attenuation and so you can get a fairly cheap cable like this that can transmit data multiple kilometers away and the other nice thing about this is because light produces so much less noise compared to an electrical signal like with a copper cable you can scram an insane amount of data over a fiber optic cable and so where you really start to see fiber becoming a more popular choice is around 10 gigabit that's because 10 gigabit over ethernet is incredibly power hungry because there's a lot of denoising software that has to go through instead light is super efficient and so you do not need nearly as much power decreasing costs across the board and so when you buy fiber optic gear this right here is a fiber optic qsfplus which is 40 gigabit pcie card and fs actually sent all this stuff over for me for free though i do have to send it back unfortunately i'll leave a link to all the stuff in the description below but what this does is it's got on the end two holes right here for what's called a transceiver so when you're working with fiber optic equipment you always have the card the transceiver and then the medium that it goes over so this transceiver right here basically goes through and just plugs directly into the card and it clicks in like that then what you do is you remove the shield and you actually plug in the cable directly into it and so then it would snap in place there and so that's how you do it you can buy different transceivers for different things so for example say you have a very short run and you do not actually need a fiber optic cable for short runs you can actually use what's called a dac cable a direct attached copper cable so what this is is it's transceivers on both ends that goes through a copper cable this makes it very cheap and it works for very short runs so you can get a 5 meter dat cable which means you don't have to pay for the expensive transceiver or the fiber optic cable and they're a little bit more durable and so this is also why whenever people bring up the fact that on synologies hey why is there not built in 10 gig to this i actually in most circumstances would rather synology not have built-in tango bit and instead save a little bit of money or include an additional pcie card as long as there is a pcie card on there so you can add it in that's because my networking gear primarily my 10 gig networking gear all uses sfp plus because it is so much cheaper you can buy an sfp plus switch for so much cheaper then you can buy a 10 gig rj45 switch that's because it's such little power and you do not need as much denoising on there and so by allowing me to choose what card i have for my 10 gig connection i could have a dual sfp plus card instead of the built-in rj45 card saving myself money and having a more simple configuration for myself and so that's actually why synology does not always have built-in 10 gig because quite frankly there are two different standards for 10 gig then once you start going higher it's all fiber so this as i said is a qsfp plus card that is 40 gigabits per second which is insanely fast and so as you can see there's a massive transceiver on here and so that's the difference between fiber optic gear generally with fiber optic stuff the actual cards are much cheaper because they have a lot much lower power draw and much simpler time but the transceivers tend to be more expensive if you don't have short enough a run to do a dac cable the other thing about fiber optic cable is it's really hard to splice fiber it is not worth it to try a splicer and fiber unless you're splicing thousands of cables so instead what you do is you get a pre-terminated ends and so fs just tells you hey how long do you want it and tell me what ends you want on it and so you can just pre-buy it like that and that way you don't have to mess with splicing the ends perfectly the other thing about fiber optic cable is it's fragile it's not going to crack if you just bend it a little bit but you don't want to be bending it constantly or have it really sharp bends in it because you actually get less performance and can actually damage the cable much more easily than you can with a copper cable the other thing with transceivers you want to make sure that whatever transceiver you get is matched to the cart unfortunately vendors decide to have their own proprietary connections for everything and so you actually would have to buy if you had an intel card you have to have an intel transceiver fs actually has a cool feature where they've emulated every single one of those cards and so what you can do is you can just buy the fs version of them and just say hey i want to make sure it's compatible with intel cisco or whatever and they seem to work really well for that and so that's one way you can do it but just make sure when you're buying a transceiver to make sure that it is compatible with whatever card you're going to be putting it into because otherwise you're going to have a bad time all right well that's going to be it for this i hope this helped kind of show up the difference between what is this sfp plus card and why is it so much cheaper and why are all these switches for 10 gig all sfv plus what is that and all those things go and leave any other tutorials you'd like to see me make in the comments below and also if you want to start sponsoring the channel i've got a link for that in description and it will give you early access to every single one of my videos and really help the channel out alright thanks for watching have a good one bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 9,682

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Id: oKPUs0OptUo

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021