Home Networking: Cheap 8 port 10Gbit Home Network setup! (Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+IN)

hey guys welcome to another video this video will be about ten gigabit networking at home and it's probably going to be a two-parter but let's get started with this because I bought a new 8 port 10 gigabit switch which is only $269 [Music] so before we get into that and I really want to open it because I haven't opened it yet but we'll do that together let's talk a little bit about the options you have when you want 10 gigabit at home so we're all used to using these UTP cables or Ethernet and they come with eight little wires in there and you have cat5e and cat6 cat 6 a cat 7 and 4 gigabit it really didn't matter all that much you could get a hundred meters of gigabit with cat 5e for 10 gigabit however especially over copper as this would be called that's a bit different you kind of need at least cat 6 and then you're still limited by distance and the higher up you go so cat 6a has some shielding and thicker wires and cat 7 adds shielding around every wire pair the signal or crosstalk and goes negation I should say becomes better and well your 10 gigabit will transfer further or last longer on the longer further cable whatever so cable quality does come into play and that's one reason what 10 gigabit hasn't become commonplace in the workplace yet because a lot of buildings has been cabled with cat 5e and well you can't really transfer 10 gigabit over that reliably for the long distances those cables are so they've made some new standards for that that's called two and a half G and 5g and those can run over cat 5e but we're talking about 10 gigabit today so you need a 10 gigabit network card for that now in the server world these are almost standard by now but in the desktop world you're still getting a normal gigabit nic on your motherboard the reason for that has been power draw 10 gigabit equipment and you can see that by this giant heatsink here draws a lot more power especially the copper variant instead of the fiber and then gigabit does and we've had to wait until they could shrink down the process notes to lower the power usage of ten gigabit and we're around that point that this is becoming viable so we're also starting to see 10 gigabits which is for at home like like my little box here but uh yeah so cabling options you have of course the standard Ethernet and if you have this in your home it's a good option but for 10 gigabit you have different options so these two go together and you get a 10 gigabit connection as long as your cable isn't too long or it's high enough quality ok but let's leave rj45 copper for what it is cuz with 10 gigabit you often see cards like this and this card has 2 SFP+ slots and I left links to all kinds of stuff in the description including some newer cards because this is an Intel X 540 which only supports 10 gigabit but newer variants which cost about a hundred bucks now so that's starting to become affordable also support the new five and two and a half gigabit speeds but I'll link everything in the description but these cards have sfp+ slots and what that means is that you can either take a fiber transceiver or a copper transceiver nowadays with 10 gigabit this is very new or which has been done a lot is use one of these DAC cables or DAC cables these come in links up to generally up to 5 meters you can get them up to 10 or active deck can go even longer but that gets a lot more expensive cables like this on eBay you can get for like 20 bucks and this is a Mellanox Connect X others actually connect extry you can get connect 6 X 2 also and you can get those for like 20 30 bucks on the cheap and well the SP cables look like this let me see if I can do this on camera nope you kind of stick it in there and then the other side is also attached to it and you stick that into another card or a switch so that makes cabling options of it are more limited that you can do with a Ethernet cable you can just disconnect the other option for that is as I showed earlier fiber and fiber can be had in gigabit and ten gigabit and then there's two standards there's multi mode and single mode now this cable is yellow that means it's single mode and single model is suited up to ten kilometers or well depends on the on the SFP or a Sophie Plus model you're using but let's just say single mode generally is good for ten kilometers and multimode in that's mostly orange or nowadays turquoise or gray or pink or they have all kinds of different standard for them if om3 and om4 s-- you don't have to remember all that but multimode is generally cheaper than single mode and you can get a multimode SFP like this for about 40 50 bucks and on eBay's and stuff like that you can get it even cheaper so if you need to do a longer run in your house and you can't use a DAC cable you can use a fiber cable and well as said you can also use a normal ethernet cable as long as it's good enough quality but that's actually often a more expensive option than using fiber cable with some sfp+ NICs so after confusing the hell out of you what should you buy for a home situation well to keep it cheap you can buy two of these NICs with a DAC cable make a direct connection between two pcs and you're done that works then you get full 10 gigabit it's awesome and you can be done for one hundred hundred fifty bucks if you want to allow rate them down you have multiple pcs you can buy a switch which also has a zippy slots and then you can hook up multiple SFP DAC pcs that works but you're kind of constrained by these cables which you can't really route through anything and everything has to be in the same room I don't have that most people don't have that so you can go the simpler up and that's using a 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC or nowadays a two and a half and a five gigabit mix and connected together that way but as I said cat5e you won't get that far so I really recommend cat 6 or cat 6a or even cat 7 for that that's partly the reason why I used cat 7 throughout the whole house and another option as I said is fiber fiber is probably actually cheaper than the ethernet option but all you have to run a special fiber cable and you have to hand get fiber SSPs and I know that can get confusing so hopefully this shows you what options there are a little bit and let's take a look at that switch because I miss really wanting to see that so my Skycam should be active and hopefully you can follow along because this is basically the first time that for $269 you get an 8 port sfp+ switch which is passively cooled so no fans which can basically do wire speed so well let's just take it right out and let's see what comes with it so there's only this tiny little power brick and this is 24 volt 1.2 amps so that's about 30 watts ok if probably why it has this this giant heatsink on the back to passively cool and then it actually comes with some rock ears cool okay oh it has one long one and one short one but I'll show you later on how it looks when I install it in my rack so let's take a quick look at that on the front we see the eight ten gigabit sfp+ slots and as I said you can use that for either a DAC cable for a fiber cable or actually for ten gigabit ethernet nowadays they have these modules they cost about $60 apiece but then you can use 10 gigabit ethernet in your sfp+ which it's not compatible with everything but with this switch it should work so in my case I'm going to use a mix of cables in my house I'm going to use some DAC cables to attach my router and my switches which all have a 10 gigabit uplink port and my desktop is beneath my patch cabinet as I've shown before and some are going to use a DAC cable there too because it's by far the cheapest option but my two servers are on the other side of the house and for that I have cat seven and we're going to use one of these or two of these modules on the switch side and then use the Intel 10 gigabit Nick's in the servers so that way I should have a 10 gigabit backbone in the form of this this actually pretty tiny switch and everything that I need 10 gigabit on should be 10 gigabit connected another thing this switch can support if you want it it has a single power input on the back but there's also a gigabit port on the front and you can use that for PUA input like 48 volts and then it basically has a dual power supply if you're looking for that so what I'm curious about is if it powers on and if it does I'm very curious to look inside so let's first check it works because this I literally like just took it out of the box I guess it should show you know can you see that oh there's a speaker inside nice not all my critics include the speaker anymore but I like having them in there there's the mikrotik blue power LED power beam because if you forget the mikrotik switch is still running just turn off the lights and you'll see all the blue power LEDs no clue why they do that so it's turned on and my little watt meter over here is saying 5.45 one that's not a lot that's perfectly acceptable for a switch especially a 10 gigabit switch but let's see what happens if it's still booty so let's plug in one of these copper as of peace because the limiting factor of these is power draw and let's see if that changes the usage right now it's using about six-and-a-half watts and if I plug this in he uses about eight so that's one-and-a-half watts but even with a few of those connected that's not too bad they do advise you though even though these ports are spaced with sorry about that even though these ports are spaced if you can space them apart from each other because although you can now get 10 gigabit ethernet in small SP plus modules they do tend to get a little bit warmer than a fiber module would that's odd because there's a laser in here and there isn't in there but that's just the way how it works so if you can space them out with some empty slots or some DAC or fiber cables in between that's best for cooling okay well enough talking about that let's take a quick look inside of the switch if you're not going to rackmount the switch they also include some rubber feet because this is a table model so you could use it that way if you wanted pain looking inside of the switch we say pretty beefy CPU cooler plate thing with heat pipes connected to the external fins and that's how to try to keep it cool other than that it's it's a pretty neat layout yep there's the little beeper I mentioned interesting this board actually has connectors for PSU one in PSU too that leads me to think that they're going to put out a dedicated rack model which has to do a power supply inside of it later on okay interesting well I like having the passive one because my wiring cabinet is inside of my office so having all passive equipment is well very much preferred other than this 8 x 10 gigabit port model they also introduced a 410 gigabit port model which is even cheaper than this one so this one was 269 and 4 times 10 gigabit plus 1 times gigabit is only 149 so if you want to add 10 gigabit for just a few pcs that's a very very doable price I would say another thing I'd like to note is that while this is a mikrotik product it can run router or s or switch OS but if you run router OS although this has a pretty decent dual-core 800 megahertz cpu don't expect 10 gigabit if you're not putting it into switch mode so each port can be configured either in bridge mode which can be done by the hardware or in software mode where you can give the port an IP do routing NAT layer 3 stuff firewalling all that kind of stuff and the CPU is in there is actually pretty decent dual-core 800 megahertz will do a gigabit one and a half gigabytes of nap and some firewall rules and stuff like that but if you start adding some queries and maybe some more filter rules and stuff like that it quickly drops down to a few hundred megabits that isn't really a problem but since you have mostly 10 gigabit ports I'd advise to treat this unit basically as a switch and don't expect too much from all the router OS and make take features besides the switch so I'm going to end this video with some shots of it installed in my racket so you can see how it looks in the rack rails and I'm going to leave it there for today in a follow-up video I'll talk a little bit more about installing these network cards and working with the lead DAC cables and or fiber and Ethernet and I also show you some throughput results and stuff like that but from what I've read online it behaves very well it's totally silent because it's passively cooled it only uses a little bit of power hence the small external adapter and well should be great so if you have any questions let me know down in the comments but if you'd like to have a longer discussion about it hit me up on our discord server and ask your questions there thank you for watching and hopefully see you back next to you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Intermit.Tech

Views: 246,558

Keywords: affordable 10Gbit, cheap 10Gbit, 10Gbit home network, 10Gbe home network, AFFORDABLE In-Home 10GbE Networking, 10Gb network switch, fanless 10Gb switch, Cheap 10Gbe, 10Gb router, home network, 10Gb Network, 10Gbase-T, 2.5Gbase-T, 5Gbase-T, 10Gb Ethernet, cheap 10Gb, 10Gb, 10Gbps, 10Gbit, aquantia, Server, 10Gb switch, passive, 10gb network, 10 gigabit, crs305, crs309, CRS309-1G-8S+IN, CRS305-1G-4S+IN, 10gbe, sfp+, fanless, silent, mikrotik, home network setup, 10gbe home network, cheap 10gbe

Id: 3uXSItOyB94

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ForSquirel]

And here I sit stuck at powerline adapters.. :(

[u/IllogicalBeans]

Ayyyyyy another Mikrotik user! There aren't many of us around, love when someone pops out of the woodwork. Nice setup, maybe someday I'll have 10Gbit too.

[u/tmiw]

I've actually heard of people being able to use Cat5e for 10 gigabit. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o5Nu5QW198 (of course, YMMV and from what I remember the distances involved weren't all that long).

Anyway, I'm still watching the video but something I'd like to know is how hot the RJ10s get in practice since Mikrotik's official guidance says stuff about not having two of them next to each other without supplemental cooling. FWIW in brief testing with a single port Mellanox SFP+ card it only felt very slightly warm after a few hours attached to a 5-10ft cable into one of the 10G ports on a Netgear GS110EMX switch.

[u/jerkfacebeaversucks]

I've been trying to buy one of these things for ages. They're like trying to find hens teeth. I ended up buying the 16 port version instead, which is still very good. I don't get full 10 gig wire speed through it however. Seems to top out around 7.5 - 8 gigabit.

[u/autumnwalker123]

Great video! Thanks for posting it!

[u/Quindor]

Hey people! I finally have a new addition to my Home Network and LAB setup! I've been eying 10Gbit for years now but always found the cost too prohibitive and ebay switches from which you need to replace fans didn't really suite my needs either, most of the equipment in my network rack is passive and low-power usage.

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Then I came across this new Mikrotik switch, and while not all the products they produce are great, this little switch with 8x SFP+ ports for 269$ is just excellent. I've been putting it through its paces the past few days and it's been performing like a champ, including some VLAN tests, and 1Gbit to 10Gbit and vice versa (that's been a problem on some newer switches), all handled well in hardware. :)

If anyone has any questions about the switch or my setup, let me know! :)

[u/myownalias]

Now if only someone made a PCIe 1x SFP+ card.

[u/Cuteboi84]

I love this. Dual power supplies. Though I've had a few hiccups that were resolved with power cycling the device. Which I couldn't reproduce. Strange, but for the price.... Why not.