I have recently updated my home network backbone to 10G but my ISP hasn’t gotten the message and still offers only max 300Mbps -_-.
With the recent acquisition of my new Dell R530 server and it’s accompanying 10G nic I decided it was time to upgrade my homelab backbone to 10G. The process was relatively painless and not too expensive. I purchased Intel 10G nics for the remaining computers and a Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+ switch to handle the 10G traffic. On top of this (and mainly for the bragging rights) I used fibre optics to connect my main workstation computer but user cat 6 RJ45 for the server.
When stress testing with Iperf3 I was able to achieve 7.41Gbps throughput but finding some stuttering. After investigating I am having some overheating concerns so I will be Jerry-rigging a fan for better cooling.
That being said I am still getting good real work performance with stable 571MBps file uploads and downloads from my NAS but I am seeing some PCIe Gen 3 limitations with my nvme drives that I will try to address on my next upgrade.
Overall this was a very successful upgrade so far and though there are still some open items and lessons learned it has drastically improved usability of the network and system backups no longer bring my network to a halt. Now if only my ISP would get the message and start offering fibre in my area.
