Upgrading the speed of your local network is often touted as a waste of money, and, frankly for many people, it can be. But if you've got the requirements for that extra speed, it can quickly become a near essential upgrade. The reasons for upgrading your network can really fall into a couple of categories — raw speed or throughput. If you're running large applications with lots of users, whether it's a big media server, VPN, or game server, you may quickly hit the limits of your local network throughput with ISP-provided hardware. Similarly, if you're moving a lot of large files regularly, or a content creator relying on your NAS for media or photo editing, you may quickly find that raw speed is what you need.

Your exact reasons why you might need to upgrade your network to a multi-gig LAN setup can vary, and will depend on your specific workload. With that in mind, here are a couple of our top reasons why it can be a good idea to upgrade your local network to a high-performance LAN setup.

4 Transferring files between devices

Save yourself some lengthy downloads

This is the obvious reason for having a high-speed local network setup. The added performance will translate directly to faster transfers between your devices. Depending on what you're using your network for, this could be a crucial improvement. For example, running large databases or storing large raw files on a NAS or file server. This isn't limited to conventional file transfers either. Apps like Steam can make use of local transfers to save your precious bandwidth and move games across your network locally. If you're running backups from your Proxmox cluster, or some other element of your home lab to another network device, having a high-performance network can also be a big help.

This is a bit of an all-encompassing point: files are transferred across people's local networks all the time. If you've got a workload that specifically benefits from a significantly higher local transfer speed, then this might be a significant improvement. If you're rarely moving files between devices, or don't run a central file server, this might be a little lower value.

3 Support for multi-gig internet

Future-proof your network for high-speed connectivity

Another useful reason to upgrade your home network to a faster than gigabit setup is to ensure support for the fastest available broadband packages. We've discussed the value of multi-gig Ethernet and internet connections before, but it's often not a clear-cut decision. Ultimately, there are viable reasons for a multi-gigabit Ethernet setup, but many of them may not apply to everyone. The value you derive from installing a multi-gig connection will ultimately depend on your workload.

If you do see a multi-gig connection in your future, or even have the option available to you now, the first step will be to ensure you've got multi-gig support internally. If you're only making use of an ISP router, it's likely they'll provide one capable of supporting 2.5 or 10gbps Ethernet, but this is an important consideration if you've got a more complex home network setup.

2 Backups

Don't choke your network all night with backups

Another helpful benefit of having a high-speed LAN setup is faster backups. If you're making use of a time machine, Proxmox backups as we mentioned earlier, or some other form of nightly or weekly automated backups, you could see significant performance improvements. This will only apply if you're backing up over the network, so local backups to an external hard drive or similar won't be affected, but by reducing the amount of time your network is burdened by the (sometimes large) file transfers involved in backups, you're hopefully reducing the impact as well.

Personally, this has been a nice benefit. As a rough sleeper, I often found that my midnight TV indulgence from my NAS was stuttering, as backups were running in the background. This is obviously personal, but if you've got a similar use case, then you might well find benefit in moving to a higher-speed LAN setup. There are obviously plenty of other solutions here, for the record, but if you're looking for an excuse to get into 2.5 or 10gbps gear locally, this might be it.

This also has a tangential benefit: faster disaster recovery. If you are in a situation where you need to restore a service or machine from backup, having top performance to get a backup mounted and running might be crucial.

1 Maximizing your NAS' performance

Don't splash out on an NVMe NAS without considering your network

If you've made the upgrade to a fully flash-based NAS, then you may be significantly hindering its performance. A full SATA SSD array might have a practical real-world speed of ~600mbps, which, while within the bounds of a gigabit connection, might still hit some bottlenecks. For contrast, a full NVMe array could easily top real-world speeds of 3gbps per second, which will easily saturate a gigabit local connection.

If you're running a SATA-based SSD array, especially in RAID, you might well be in the range of hitting a network bottleneck for performance. If you're running NVMe SSDs, you almost certainly are. Whether this is a concern to you depends on your use case, and the number of users hitting your NAS, but you might well want to do some testing yourself to determine if you can achieve higher transfer speeds. You could do this by moving some files locally between disks on your NAS, and testing the available speed locally, before moving the same file over the network.

Multi-gig can be a big upgrade for the future

If you're considering upgrading your network to a higher-performance, multi-gig setup, you'll need to consider the value proposition. Similar to having a multi-gig connection, there aren't really any downsides to having it, other than cost. That cost might be money, or could be an investment in time (as many seasoned homelabbers might know), but ultimately we're prioritizing our money, time, and effort constantly and without a clear need, upgrading to a multi-gig setup can be a waste for many people. Ultimately, the value of a multi-gig setup will be personal to your workload and network requirements, but it can be near essential when required.