Multi-Gig for the Masses — Building an inexpensive 10GbE network for the home Taylor Wilsdon Follow Mar 15 · 12 min read

My hope with this article is to show that it is becoming increasingly possible to implement a high performance network in a home environment without breaking the bank — and hopefully save you some time by sharing my mistakes along the way. With that said, if you stumbled across this piece looking for the best router for your home internet connection and terms like NBase-T, Fiber, SFP+ & RJ45 transceivers sound like gibberish to you, I’ll save you some frustration and point you to an excellent consumer routing device ranker at SmallNetBuilder.

Our target audience here is probably going to be a mix of creative professionals who need tons of high speed storage available to their local machine (photographers, videographers, editors etc), small businesses looking to offer higher performance file shares to a handful of clients and lastly, where I come in — engineers who are exposed to high performance environments in a professional setting and want the best in their own environment (and willing to jump through hoops & pay the early adopter tax to accomplish it). If you get the gist of how a RAID array works and the benefits it can provide, or you can explain the differences (and overlap) between modems, routers, switches and access points, then continue onward!

A few years ago, this was largely impractical — 10 gig equipment was restricted to the domain of server class gear, most switches were rack mount only (and about as quiet as a 747) and there were no options beyond complex solutions like running a PCIe server card in a Thunderbolt enclosure. This all changed with the wide release of NBase-T gear within the last two years (2019 was a big year for cheap, fast networks). These new solutions offer exceptional performance with far fewer drawbacks than data center class equipment at a much more palatable cost. My suspicion is that as 5G wireless technology becomes more ubiquitous and multi-gigabit connection speeds become normalized, we’ll see more and more consumer equipment available at a lower price point.

For the tl;dr crowd, I’ll summarize what you’ll find below as such — you can get a functional ad-hoc multi-gig connection for $54 by pairing two CableCreation 2.5GBase-T USB adapters and reusing an existing ethernet cable. You’ll want to manually assign each adapter a manual IP address in a different subnet than the rest of your network to avoid things getting routed incorrectly. Of course, this limits you significantly and requires a second Ethernet port on one or both of the devices for access to the WAN and your broader home network, so it’s not ideal for most. For $200-$225, you can implement the same adapters and a switch with two or more multi-gig compatible ports for a much more seamless implementation. $450 buys you a full 10GbE network with room to grow, you’ll want to look at the Setup Examples section below. Now, we’ll cover the options on the market for connectivity to both the host and switch.

Adapters:

10GbE

Thunderbolt:

A larger number of vendors offer Thunderbolt 2 & 3 based external adapters, ideal for portable devices like the Macbook Pro as well as miniature servers like the Intel NUC series. Options like the Sonnet Solo 10G, OWC Thunderbolt 3, Monoprice Thunderbolt 3 10G Adapter, QNAP QNA-T310G1S and more offer a variety of bus powered options that generally cost around $150. These adapters will give you full 10GbE speed over copper or fiber (depending on configuration). They tend to get hot, they’re fairly large and must be connected directly to the system or as part of a TB3 daisy chain.

PCIe:

For desktop PCs, servers and standalone NAS units, a PCIe NIC is likely a better option assuming a free PCIe port on the motherboard. These cards can be extremely cheap ($25–30 for older Mellanox & Intel units) and up to around $100 for a desktop grade Asus 10GbE PCIe, recent make dual port card. PCIe cards can also support 2.5GBase-T like the TRENDnet 2.5GbE ($35) and 5GbE ($75, very uncommon).

If you’re going to be using up a PCIe slot, you should go 10GbE — there’s really no reason not to. You may find the best prices on eBay for used server grade equipment in this category, as the retail prices are much higher. Intel’s X520/X540/X550-T2 (T indicates RJ45 connection type, and the 2 represents the number of ports) and DA(X) models, which offer SFP+ ports. You can get a solid card for $35–50 all day with modern driver support, so no reason to waste your time with desktop class 2.5/5GBase-T. I haven’t tried it personally, but I’ve gotten a recommendation for the HP NC522SFP as an inexpensive option as well — two SFP+ 10GbE ports for $30 is definitely an appealing proposition!

USB:

Though the USB-C spec does offer speeds of up to 10Gbps, there are no currently offered 10GbE adapters using the protocol. However, there are a number of options, starting with the budget option that may satisfy most home users:

$28 will buy you a CableCreation 2.5GBase-T USB adapter (USB A or C) with a Realtek RTL8156 chipset, which works great in both Windows & Mac systems and has been one of the most reliable options I’ve found. These inexpensive, lightweight adapters don’t get too hot (but adding a thermal strip/heatsink to these adapters is never a bad idea) and perform very well in my own experience.

For around $80, you can find a handful of options from QNAP’s 5GbE USB adapter, Sonnet’s Solo5g and others that wrap a larger shell around an Aquantia-supplied 5GBase-T chip. Anecdotally, my experience with these has not been as good — I’ve never been able to surpass ~3.2Gbps using these adapters directly connected with Jumbo frames enabled on two high end endpoints fully capable of saturating a 10GbE link. I’d skip this — go cheap and go 2.5gbe (which USB 3.0 is more than capable of delivering) or go all out and get Thunderbolt based 10GbE devices (or USB 3.2, when we get ‘em!)

Docking Stations

This header should really read “Docking Station,” as there is only one model on the market I’m aware of that fits the bill. The Akitio Thunder3 Dock Pro is a TB3 dock akin to the numerous options from OWC, Belkin, Caldigit etc but with a noticeable difference — it features a 10GbE Ethernet port! It’s expensive, though it has been on sale for as low as $170 in the past, which is a steal at that price if you already need a dock.

Switches:

I can only hope that as adoption rises, so do the number of options for multigig switching in the consumer space. While the enterprise enjoys a glut of 10GbE capable equipment (as well as 40GbE and 100GbE), the SOHO options are much more limited — and let’s be honest here, most of our significant others, roommates and guests are probably going to have some questions about giant, incredibly loud rackmount switches of yesteryear carefully moving all of the dust in your house into their vents. With that, our options basically come down to a handful of options:

Netgear offers the GS series 10 port SMB switches, with a managed and unmanaged option — both have 8 gigabit ports and two 10GbE capable copper RJ45 ports. They also offer the S8000/GS810EMX, a gaming-design switch with the same port configuration above that’s either better or worse looking depending on your design sensibilities — it does seem to have better cooling than the SMB models, though it’s harder to wall or desk mount. The GS110MX runs $160 at time of writing.

An option that will be particularly appealing to those with more than 3 clients that need a variety of high speed capabilities and already have existing Ethernet runs is the Netgear MS510TX 10-Port Multi-Gigabit/10G Smart Managed Pro Switch. For $255 right now on Amazon, you get 2 x 2.5G ports, 2 x 5G ports, 1 10G Ethernet port and 1 10G SFP+ port. That’s a very attractive package given that it would enable you to effectively utilize adapters across the price spectrum and offers both RJ45 and SFP+ full 10G options.

QNAP offers several options, including a reasonably priced 3 port option with two SFP+ 10GbE ports and a combo RJ45/SFP+ port. For $189, that’s probably the best option for a 3 client setup.

ASUS offers a $200-ish option that I probably wouldn’t buy unless you found it on sale somewhere when it’s inevitably discontinued.

TRENDnet’s TEG-30284 is a solid option for a SOHO environment with a need for more ports, offering 24 gigabit ethernet ports and 4x10GbE SFP ports for your high speed needs.

Mikrotik offers the widest range of consumer-priced gear, but its probably better suited to those more familiar with barebones software and a good understanding of networking fundamentals. For $130, you can get a tiny 5 port 10GbE (fiber) switch with a single gigabit RJ45 port.

Need more capacity? Mikrotik also offers the CRS309–1G-8S+IN, with 8x10G SFP ports and 1x1G RJ45.

Ubiquiti offers a handful of 10GbE compatible models at a significantly higher price point than these, but they’re probably the best option if you’ve already invested in a Cloud Key and have an existing Ubiquiti infrastructure in place. The Ubiquiti Networks US-16-XG 10G runs just over $500, but gives you a total of 16 10GbE ports (12 SFP+ and 4 RJ45, all capable of full 10Gbps).

Sample configurations below — I have tried out more of these than I care to admit, and I’ll try to outline any caveats I’ve come across along the way.

Budget performance king:

Mikrotik 5 port 10GbE SFP+ fiber switch (CRS305–1G-4S+IN) — $130

Copper 10GbE transceivers run $35-$45/port if you prefer RJ45.

Supports relatively inexpensive DAC cables, ideal for a high performance home NAS installation

Room to scale thanks to 5 ports.

Supports 10GbE & 2.5/5GBase-T

2xTB3 SFP+ adapters (or 1+1xPCIe for a NAS): $300

DAC cable: $15

For $450, you’ve got a full speed 10 gig setup with room to grow clients. With two mobile devices or a laptop + NAS, you’re not going to do better than that, period. Downsides are you’ll need new cabling, unless you already have a fiber run or you purchase RJ45 transceivers, which push the price up to the point where some of these other solutions with native copper ports make more sense.

One client & one server or NAS:

The Netgear and QNAP switch options both work fine here, and can potentially be a cheap way to use existing wiring. Remember that your cable type plays an important role — it’s possible to run 10GbE speeds over CAT5e, but only for short runs. CAT6 is recommended if you’ve got a large area to cover. Downsides to most of the cheaper options here are that you only get 2 or 3 ports, so it likely wouldn’t be useful in a small business environment, but great for a home with one server or NAS and a single client that needs max performance, with the others well served by gigabit. In addition, many NAS vendors offer multi-gig port options even on low end models, so you may not need an additional adapter.

QNAP 10GbE NAS

I want fast, but not that fast (aka: I don’t have a crazy RAID setup and use spinning platter drives, so I don’t need more than 2.5/5gbps) can be had very inexpensively. If you’re comfortable enough with setting up an ad-hoc network , you’re golden— just make sure to use a different subnet than your existing network. Basically, you can connect your NAS to its built in gigabit to serve the rest of your clients, and then use a USB based adapter (or PCIe card, if supported) to open up a second port, then connect your client using another adapter directly to it and manually assign each NIC a static IP. Example:

MacBook Pro with CableCreation 2.5GBase-T USB adapter set to 192.168.1.2

set to 192.168.1.2 NAS with 2.5GbE port or PCIe card with IP set to 192.168.1.3

Now, those devices can mount shares using that IP and data will pass over the direct network, and crossover cables are no longer needed with modern networking equipment. This is a great way to get 250MB/s or better for $50, total. I suspect you won’t be able to do this cheaper than that for years to come. The screenshot below is using iperf3 with 10 parallel streams between two hosts connected using the CableCreation adapters and my Netgear 10GbE switch.

If you add a switch like the Netgear into the mix, you can avoid the network tomfoolery (and not have two sets of drives mounted) and you’re looking at $225–250 — a very reasonable cost of entry for a 250% increase in performance, enough to saturate a fast 7200RPM or 10000RPM spinning platter drive or get you “good enough” performance on a SATA SSD. Upgrade to 5GbE (around $50 each more, so $100 total for two endpoints) and you’ve got a $350 setup that can max out most SATA III SSDs. That’s pretty close to the sweet spot, but since your switching supports 10GbE I’d suspect most will just go straight for the full speed setup listed above at that point. Main upside with the 5GbE adapters is size and the fact that it’s USB, so it can be connected to a hub and you can maintain a single port setup for a Thunderbolt equipped laptop using a dock.

What hasn’t worked for me:

This section is going to cover things that seem like they might work for you, but almost certainly won’t — at least not yet. Particularly tempting examples include the recent swath of WiFi 6/draft 802.11ax equipment — many of the highest end models (Netgear AX12 AX11000, Asus ROG Rapture GT-AX11000 etc) include a single 5GBase-T or 2.5GBase-T port, ostensibly so you can hardwire a high speed NAS or server into the fast paced world of WiFi 6. The reality? WiFi 6 will give you roughly gigabit ethernet speeds on a VERY good day, assuming optimal conditions with the client very close to the AP or router. In addition, very few clients support it — your brand new 16" Macbook Pro included (though why Apple would include WiFi 6 in the iPhone 11 but not the even newer “professional” laptop is beyond me). So what does that mean for you? Well, that means your fancy 5GbE port is functionally useless. If none of the other ports are 5GbE (they aren’t) and WiFi isn’t really any faster than gigabit, then what’s the point?

The answer is basically that it looks good on paper. But Taylor, you exclaim, can’t I take advantage of the super awesome link aggregation functionality on the AX11000? Sure thing friend, you can get fancy and set up a LAG on the Netgear to get 2Gb/s to one client and 5Gb/s to another, but at that point you’ve got a complicated setup offering poor performance that requires two Ethernet cables ran to the link-aggregated device and an endpoint with two Ethernet ports that also supports LACP, all at a price that’s higher than the real solutions listed above. Short answer — don’t bother, WiFi 6 is not ready yet. I’m the definition of a too-early adopter, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s too early.

When vendors start shipping widespread, fast 802.11AX cards in clients we can revisit this section — WiFi 6 offers a lot of advantages, particularly if you have a high number of devices, but until then I believe it is not ready for prime time. In the meantime, a wired network following the examples above is going to be the absolute best bang for your buck.