Our readers have been asking about 10-Gigabit Ethernet devices for several years. It was a common question whenever we have a live stream with motherboard vendors. 10GbE is still quite rare. Gigabit Ethernet is good enough for basically any consumer application short of communicating with network-attached, high-end SSDs. It has several applications for businesses of course, such as connecting web servers to one or more internet connections, or tying compute devices together into a cluster.
ASUS has just announced a 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch, although it has limited usage (according to its product photo). The device has ten ports, but only two are 10-Gigabit Ethernet. This means that you are not gaining any 10-Gigabit devices, because you could have just connected devices 9 and 10 together without the switch. What this provides is the ability to append eight, 1-Gigabit Ethernet devices onto two devices that each have a single, 10-Gigabit Ethernet port, while letting those two connect together.
So 9 and 10 can still communicate at 10-Gigabit Ethernet, while seeing 1 through 8 as Gigabit devices, all on a single 10-Gigabit Ethernet port. I'm not sure whether the 10GbE ports, 9 and 10, can talk to multiple of the other eight, Gigabit Ethernet ports at a combined rate that is higher than gigabit.
No word yet on pricing or availability, because it might vary by region. They also don't seem to have a website up for this product at the moment, but the product will be on display at the show.
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It took me a while to figure
It took me a while to figure out the use of this but then I figured it out. I’m lucky enough to get 10Gb Internet here in Minneapolis from US Internet. If I were to upgrade, I would probably use realistically have one 10Gb PC, the rest would be Gigabit. This would allow me to connect me 10Gb connection to my 10Gb PC and also connect to the rest of my 1Gb to the same connection.
Gigabit Ethernet is good
Gigabit Ethernet is good enough for basically any consumer application short of communicating with network-attached, high-end SSDs
No. A single run of the mill HDD can totally saturate gigabit Ethernet. The maximum theoretical speed is just 125MB/s, and that’s excluding any overheads. I only got 80-100MB/s on my home-built NAS, but I only used the Motherboard’s Ethernet. If I had bought a NIC or built a more powerful server in the first place I might have gotten more. Now I use multiple USB3 connected external drives instead. At 5 Gigabit each it’s at least the speed of the drives that’s the limiting factor.
Those speeds are good enough
Those speeds are good enough for most applications of network-attached storage.
Not when you have multiple
Not when you have multiple users on the network transferring large files at the same time.
We’re currently using 2x1Gbps LAGs across all the switches and our server to try to overcome limits.
Would be nice to reduce the number of cables around the house and boost it so more users can saturate their gigabit links without saturating the network backbone or the link to our file server.
The most appealing use case
The most appealing use case for me:
– buy two of these
– Place 1 at my incoming internet service location (my office)
– use my existing Cat 6a cable that runs across the house and downstairs to the second 10g switch.
– a 10g crossover patch cable connects the downstairs switch to the in-wall 10g jack.
I don’t have any 10g Ethernet devices, but I have several 1g devices at each end. The 10g uplink ensures they don’t saturate the connection between them.
Thoughts?
I agree with Greg, I need
I agree with Greg, I need this for the same/similar reason.
Yes a singe HDD can run faster (with sequential IO) than 1GigE, but I don’t have this workload except maybe occasionally backup.
This is a great solution for 1 10G device (eg NAS or VMware server) and several regular clients, plus an uplink to the Internet or another room/office.