When I put together my first Network-Attached Storage setup years ago, I was mostly concerned with the underlying distro, TrueNAS Core, and spent way too much time experimenting with different network shares, drive configurations, and compression settings. But after the initial enthusiasm died down, I began optimizing the entire setup to match my home lab needs. This involved everything from arming it with TrueNAS Community Edition (or Scale, as it was called back then) to changing NAS models, buying extra drives, and RAM (again, it was pretty inexpensive back in 2023).

But since my current NAS model already has 10G Ethernet ports, arming my PC (and later, home server) with the same networking capabilities became my next upgrade. And as much as it was a vanity upgrade, I don’t ever want to go back to a slower standard.

Let it be known: 1GbE is sufficient for most home labs

And 2.5G is solid for data hoarders

Before I gush over my 10 gigabit connection, let me add that it’s nowhere near necessary, even for hardcore home labs. Most cheap consumer mobos, budget-friendly NAS units, and entry-level mini-PCs ship with 1GbE capabilities, and that’s not bad when you’re starting out. In fact, the first NAS I built from old PC parts had a "mere" 1 gigabit port, and while the backup tasks were a bit slow, I could just leave the NAS alone for a couple of hours. The same aspect applies to self-hosted tasks, as most of the essential FOSS tools work just fine on 1GbE speeds. In fact, the only use case where a faster connection produces noticeable results is when you have to transfer TBs of files to your image, ROM, and other media management tools.

But even then, you can always upgrade to 2.5G equipment once your data hoarding tendencies start to become noticeable. After all, 2.5GbE switches, cables, and network cards barely cost a fortune, and even 5G equipment is starting to get affordable (especially if you compare it to the price tags on typical PC components). Heck, if your setup is fairly recent, you might even have 2.5G capabilities baked into your budget-friendly motherboards and NAS units.

Personally, I just can’t go back after getting a taste of 10GbE speeds

It adds blazing fast speeds to my (local) backups and wacky experiments

With that out of the way, I have to admit that arming my systems with 10G capabilities made a bunch of tasks extremely snappy. Local backups from my PC to the NAS needed less than an hour – a far cry from my 1G experience, and the same holds true for large file transfers. In fact, that’s the reason why I was so keen on grabbing another 10G network card for my Proxmox home server, as I could use it to expedite the initial snapshots and particularly large deltas for my virtual guests.

Now, write operations on my RAID 10 HDDs can only benefit so much from 10GbE speeds, but read operations are a different story altogether. Accessing large files stored on my NAS takes a few seconds, and it’s all thanks to the RAM cache on the ZFS-powered TrueNAS setup.

And that’s before you include the SSD pools in my NAS. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a firm believer that backups should be stored on hard drives, far away from the NAND cells of SSDs. However, the latter are fantastic for short-term data transfers, and NVMe drives get to spread their wings with a 10G setup (even though PCIe Gen 3 and faster SSDs can technically end up choking the high-speed standard). Besides conventional file transfers, I also use my old SSDs to house large games that I play occasionally. As unhinged as it may sound, the latency on an iSCSI share deployed on my NVMe drives over a 10GbE connection isn’t noticeable in the slightest, while the loading times are only a few seconds longer than a conventional SSD connected to my PC.

For a 10GbE connection between two devices, the upfront costs aren’t very high, either

Although the jump from affordable 2.5G paraphernalia to a 10GbE setup is pretty huge, there are ways to cut down on the initial upgrade cost. For example, I already have a NAS with a 10GbE port, so all I had to do was grab a cheap network card for my PC. I went with a TP-Link NIC that isn’t perfect by any means, but it works really well on Windows/Linux setups. As for the switch, I went with a cheap 12-port (with just three 10-gigabit Ethernet ports, and one SFP+ connection) option from Zyxel, and I could’ve lowered the costs if I hadn’t opted for a managed switch. Sure, $500 for the whole package (including the NIC I later bought for my home server) is pretty steep, but I probably could’ve brought it down to $350 if I had gone with the cheapest options on Amazon. Heck, if I didn't need to connect my NAS with other server nodes, I could've ditched the switch and directly wired my NAS's 10G port to the TP-Link TX401 NIC.

Again, I don’t mean to say that you can’t survive without 10GbE speeds. On the contrary, 1G is pretty decent for home labs, while 2.5 gigabit is more than enough. It’s just that 10 gigabit connectivity makes transfer operations extremely quick, especially for my impatient self.