I’ve bought plenty of upgrades for my home lab over the years, and these range from handy PCIe cards and extra memory (before the RAM apocalypse) for my primary workstation to spare nodes and remote backup hubs. That said, network devices have easily been some of the most expensive upgrades out of all my paraphernalia, even though my descent into the networking rabbit hole didn’t cost me a lot of money in the beginning. Both my PC and NAS already supported 2.5G functionality, so all I had to do was buy a switch capable of these speeds.

But after grabbing more workstation nodes, I began eyeing 10 gigabit hardware. And before I knew it, I’d already ordered a networking stack capable of supporting 10G speeds for my primary server, NAS, and PC. Truth be told, the 2.5G upgrade was definitely necessary for my tinkering devices, though I can’t say the same thing about my 10GbE investment. But you know what? I love it regardless of how unnecessary it was for my home lab.

Blazing fast file transfers are my favorite aspect of this setup

My backups benefit tremendously from RAM caching and 10GbE

As someone who grew up hearing horror stories about lost data, my first instinct after building my first NAS was to set up backup workflows for my computing paraphernalia – with my gaming/work PC being the most important machine of them all. After I grabbed a used Xeon rig and turned it into a VM and LXC-hosting Proxmox server, my backup needs expanded exponentially.

Unfortunately, a 1GbE switch would cause my backup tasks to take ages. Although 2.5G alleviated this problem, few things are as satisfying as watching hundreds of gigabytes worth of files get backed up on my NAS within a few minutes. This applies to my normal file-sharing tasks as well. Bulk-transferring ISOs and templates from my PC to my server no longer takes half an hour, and the same holds true for the TV shows and movies I transfer to my NAS after ripping them from Blu-ray discs.

You see, my PVE server primarily includes SSDs, and the same holds true for my PC. Meanwhile, my current NAS is a hybrid rig that supports both hard drives and SSDs, though I still use HDDs for my backup and long-term storage needs. That’s where RAM caching comes into the equation, as it lets me boost the transfer speeds of my bulky HDDs and makes them viable for high-speed data archival tasks.

10 gigabit Ethernet opens doors to some truly wacky projects

Besides increasing the speed of my backup tasks, the faster networking standard also makes a bunch of seemingly insane projects viable. For example, a standard 1G connection just doesn’t cut it for editing 4K video files stored on my NAS. However, its high-speed standard is more than enough for demanding DaVinci Resolve workflows, so I don’t need to populate my PC with more SSDs just to edit some footage.

Then there’s the gaming part of the equation. Although the latency is minimal in 2.5G and 10G connections, the loading (and fast-travel) times are significantly faster on the latter – to the point where I wouldn’t have noticed the games were running off SSD-based iSCSI shares had I not documented everything during the experiment.

But in hindsight, it seems somewhat unnecessary

I had to buy more components besides a 10GbE switch

Now that I’ve been using my network stack for a few months, I’ll admit that the 10G upgrade was overkill, especially since I had to invest in some extra paraphernalia. The only outlier was the TerraMaster F4-424 Max NAS I use as my primary storage hub, as it already includes two 10 gigabit ports. But without extra PCIe cards, my PC has a modest 2.5G port, while the no-name X99 mobo I use with my Xeon processors only supports 1GbE connectivity.

This meant I had to buy two 10G Network Interface Cards alongside a new switch. Even though I went for cards featuring the ultra-cheap Marvell AQtion interface, the NICs set me back by $200. Plus, VLAN support is essential for my smart home needs, which is why I had to drop even more on a 10 gigabit managed switch. After arming my PC and server with the new NICs, I’ve got three devices with 10GbE connectivity, so I needed a switch with at least three 10G ports. In the end, I bought a Zyxel managed switch for nearly $300. Throw in some Cat6A cables, and the 10G upgrade had already cost me over $500. While it’s somewhat cheaper than I anticipated (hey, I grew up drooling over servers that cost a few grand), 10 gigabit is definitely unnecessary for a home labber. But the blazing-fast speeds of my data transfer and backup tasks more than make up for the premium price of the setup.

I don’t need my entire home lab to run at 10G speeds

By now, you may have realized that only three systems in my home lab run at 10GbE speeds, while the rest are limited to 1G and 2.5G connectivity. Well, my NAS, server, and PC are the only devices that can benefit from the faster standard. So, I don’t feel the need to upgrade the rest of my paraphernalia to 10G. For example, I’ve built a PVE cluster from old devices, and these systems can remain on my old 2.5G switch. The same holds true for the 2.5GbE NAS units and SBCs, while my smart devices can simply plug into cheap 1G switches without any noticeable drop in performance.